


feel your ghost when i'm alone

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, M/M, Magical Realism, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 08:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12031602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: A girl who will not remain a princess is doomed to become a witch.





	feel your ghost when i'm alone

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to my best girl, who did not step on me when i swooned onto her floor in rage during edits, and who graciously ignored all my shouts of CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT AFTER ALL THE PORN I'VE WRITTEN I CAN'T GET THESE UNGRATEFUL FUCKERS TO HAVE TELEPATHIC REUNION SEX IN THE COCKPIT.
> 
> but, in all seriousness: fair warning that this fic contains zero banging. nobody will ever be more outraged about this than me.

A memory, first:

_I want to tell you a secret. No, don't laugh—_

_Keith. I need you to trust me. All right?_  


# *

  
Silence like a seawave. Silence like thunder locked in ice. Silence.

"Where am I?"

" _Shiro_." Words come, sharp and jagged, shaping pale sound out of the black. Fists rasp. A voice like copper bows close. "Shiro—don't move. You're safe."

"Safe, huh." He's the echo of an echo, chafed raw on throat and teeth and tongue. "That's a pretty big promise. Are you okay? You sound—"

"Fine. I'm—fine. It's almost over, Shiro."

"Almost? No—" A breath drawn slow, steeling. "Don't tell me yet. How're the others doing?"

"They made it. Everyone's okay. No—" Teeth grind; layers whisper together, cotton and skin gossiping over a hush stretched tight. "Just stay down—all right? You need to rest."

Metal clicks, then quiets; his laugh rusts with it. "Listen to yourself for a second, Keith."

"What?"

"No—I mean just listen. By the _sound_ of it," gritted, hissing, "I'm not in one of the usual healing pods. Either Pidge found a way to rig up a system to communicate with people inside the pod, or—" One long breath—shuddered in and ground out. "I'm guessing that last battle took them out of commission. But I'm here, and so are you. Whatever's going on, you can tell me." 

Silence.

"You don't have to think about it right now, Shiro."

"You said it yourself. It's not over yet."

 _Silence_.

"Keith. Can I talk to the others?"

"No—" A whisper, thin as film sinking into an open flame. "Shiro, you can't. You can't tell anyone you're here."  


# *

  
A lesson: prison is—  
1\. a cage for the flesh not the feast;  
2\. a liminal trust;  
3\. a war-maker.

If you're willing, then listen. No one yet has asked that you understand. The weak trust nothing that the prison doors swallow; a king mistrusts the prison itself. Knowing the difference is the first key to power.  


# *

  
"You _know_ what happened to him."

The prison doors hiss, unclench, swing wide. 

Light after light wakes with the snap of her steps. Down the prison corridor she walks, and each new flare scrapes the black out from the hollows between pillars. _Wake_. Her heel taps a demand through the hall, and her castle answers. Passing cells flash up empty, benches and loose chains scattered like motes gleaming through the white of an eye, drowsy history lidding up from its parched-grey dreaming. 

Steps ahead, one cell's already burning awake.

He's standing on the white landing at the hall's end. His hair bristles black as he lifts his head, staring up through the criss-crossing of lasers lashed from pillar to pillar. Each bar hums blue, blue, blue, fencing the landing from the greyed cell, the boy from the monster. Separated, alone, he grinds back on his heels like a sentry walking through his last hour, a ghost in red-striped paladin's gear. Fists locked, feet braced apart. Shoulders drawn back as if to an archer's pull, an inch short from _fire_. He might have been here since the capture, since their last mission's end. Probably he has. 

The bayard winks through his fingers, raw-red and bone-white through the shivering laserlights. 

" _Talk_ ," Keith snarls.

In her cell, the witch Haggar smiles a flaying smile.

"Oh," she breathes. Contempt boils the sigh to steam. "I know _you_ , don't I. The brat with veins too cheap to hold the blood they should."

His head wrenches in place, reflexive; his fists jump with the tic of a retort bitten down. "Whatever you think you know about me, you don't. I'm not one of your mindless _Galra._ "

Even on her knees she has the look of a witch: a gaze that clings like spoiled fruit, teeth snapping yellow as her claws curl against her robes. The force of her wafts through the pale bars, reeking—it's a wonder that Keith doesn't reel from it. "No," she says; her gaze tracks him without thought, a missile that needs no sensory data. "You are one of the usurping paladins of Voltron. No worthy Galra would ever betray his emperor in such a way." 

"Coming from you? I think I'll take it as a compliment."

"Do you mean to execute me, usurper? Your half-hearted band's taken some time to steel yourselves to the task."

"No one's going to kill you," Keith grits, all clean jaw and cracking bite. "As long as you tell us what happened and how to fix it. You _know_ that."

The witch stretches out a hand; her fingertips follow the trailing lights, curious as snake's tongues, without grazing a single pale particle. "You'd find bargaining far easier, if you were Galra. You've offered me nothing; you've come to me with a shield between us, and you've now given away your only threat. Tell me, usurper—why should I cooperate with you?"

The lasers snarl. 

He's stepped too close, degrees short of lunging; his fists jerk, a stutter short of slamming into the livid, crackling bars. Allura drops back a step as a burst of sparks stings his thin-shelled paladin's suit. "What do you _want?_ " Keith shouts, and there's nothing human in the echoes of all his raw, branding fury. "At least tell me that—tell me _anything_."

Her eyes flick like hooded lanterns. "So many secrets you must crave," the witch murmurs, "to stoop to questioning prisoners. Altea's soldiers would have turned their swords on themselves before they'd come begging for words from a traitor."

"No one _cares_ —"

Allura says, "You won't find weakness in Voltron by talking about my father's time, Haggar."

Keith jolts, but she's already swept to his side without a glance to spare. They can't afford to show weakness, not now.

"Alfor's child." A hiss twists in Haggar's yellow teeth. "And what would _you_ beg from me today? Surely _you_ wouldn't trust my word."

Beneath the prison's furious electric song, she clasps her hands, holds her head high. "We do not _seek_ ," Allura says, precise, "anything more than what it will take to bring peace to the worlds that Zarkon destroyed. Whether you offer your loyalties is your own choice. However, so long as you remain our prisoner, you are at Altea's mercy. You'd do well to remember it."

The witch fingers the laser bars. No smoke rises from living lines of light, but a reek curls and fumes up in a ghost's gasp, rotting meat running to ash. At her shoulder, a stained-sour sound flecks Keith's teeth; he grits it back.

"Child," Haggar says, a title as much as a whole answer. "Nothing remains of your father's kingdom but this castle and the memories burned into the backs of your eyes. Can a flightless creature claim the sun? Does a mite rule the dust? Altea is no more."

Her dark eyes hold; her voice lashes the hall. "Don't pretend ignorance. Zarkon has ruined hundreds on thousands of. Altea is forging alliances across the galaxies with the planets who can no longer stand Galra corruption—we'll have hundreds before the end of the deca-phoeb."

"You gossip of weakness, not of a world reborn."

"You remain our guest, Haggar, because Altean custom recognises your personhood. Would you prefer the alternative? I've heard that the Galra dispose of useless cargo in the farthest reaches of empty space."

Haggar curls her lip. " _Altea_ ," she says. "Alfor gave up all claim to Voltron from the moment that he committed it to an intergalactic crusade. The paladins aren't yours, as they never were. This war has transcended you. You're merely the key to a weapon long unlocked. And so, I ask: if Altea's forging these bonds, where are its representatives? Your world's burned past even alchemic salvation; your bloodline will soon run dry. Princess, tell me," Haggar whispers on a witch's bedizened tongue, "where is the glory of plating a name over a people so long lost?"

_Tell me._

She has Coran. She has language, a universe's open cage to scour for refugees. She has a _soldier_ , an armed guard waiting at her back—but Keith's dwindled to a shadow, emptied out and gone with the poison that Haggar had poured into his ear.

Only her father's voice rings in her like fire through steel. 

"You stand," Allura whispers, "on territory that was consecrated by the five rituals of essential transference. You stand within the walls that my grandfather built, the walls for which my father sacrificed _everything_ to keep from enemy dominion. The planet Altea remains because I lay claim to it, because I have not yielded to time and I will not yield. You may have served as Zarkon's witch; but in these halls, your very life hangs on Altea's mercy, _my mercy_. Either you'll remember an Altean's manners or a prisoner's—but so long as you speak to me, Haggar, you _will_ choose one."

In the lidded eye of the prison cell, Haggar's candleflame gaze sinks away.

"A witch's warning, then," she says, "for the child clinging to her last great prize." 

Her fingers close on a crackling laser. Allura bites down a noise—Haggar's teeth snap livid and leering between the caging lights, _laughing_ as her skin crackles and reddens, blistering, bursting into felt wet sound. 

_Your half-hearted band's taken some time to steel yourselves to the task._

Scorch's still trickling from the witch's serpentine hands as they jerk open, loose as a first frost. "Were I you, I would watch your forces, Princess Allura," Haggar says, above the rich reek of smouldering flesh. "It seems that you have a traitor in your midst."

Too shrill, Allura says, "If you're just going to stir up nonsense—"

Haggar steps back, turns up her charred palms like cards; her stiff lips purse, puff the smoke off of skin gleaming ink-veined and bare as crystal. The Galra have always loved strategems, prying for weaknesses. She should have expected no better. "You bear no wounds that a witch could cure," she says. "I see no difference between the Voltron which wounded Emperor Zarkon and the Voltron that you form now. Five paladins and their key. A champion of the Galra Empire flies for you still. What loss have you suffered?"

_A champion of the Galra empire._

The trouble with poison, Allura has always known: its identification comes after its harm. Her eyes catch Keith's, filter the color draining down through his jaw, his glass-clear fury. His wrists, shoulders, whole frame trembling blind.

The red bayard reels, circle into blade. Unseeing, Keith lunges, and the prison bars flare white.  


# *

  
"Keith!"

Fluorolamps rattle down the hall. The world shivers, cringing into substance, and color comes tiding back: beige halls, charging blue currents, shadows drawn sharp as the cagebars left floors behind him. He's standing in some hard-forged castle corridor, thinking of impact and acceleration and the lost velocity burning in his skull. He's thinking that he could have hit her. That he should have, and how the ache of that last pulled punch flows from wristbones to knuckles. 

Enemies were easier to handle when he could cut them down.

The faraway thunder of the prison gates rocks the walls, closing. Too late the rest of his senses come flocking: pale hair, long skirts swaying—by the time he twists, her shadow's caught and swallowed his. "Keith, _stop_ ," and she's a bell struck shrill, an inhuman hand anchoring his arm, fingerpoints striking in meteors—

Keith wrenches away. 

Silence charges between them, a current churning live. Allura's mouth firms. " _When_ were you planning on telling me?"

 _Tell you what,_ but that'd be stubbornness more than misunderstanding. Between them, they've got reams of both to spare. His shoulder throbs once, a blunt and resentful ache. "She's been in there for four weeks," Keith says. "Someone had to do it."

"Someone," she says, through the hiss stitched into her tongue. "It's strange how that seems to mean _you, alone_ every time you use the word. Is that another custom from Earth?"

"Well, it's not like _waiting_ was getting us anywhere."

Her gaze lashes across his face, laser-bright and fit to char. "There's no one left in the castle that Voltron can afford to lose."

"So you're not even going to _try_?"

"Tell me that you've an alternative, Keith," she bites out, " _any_ alternative, and we'll make the decision together as a _team_."

Their echoes flare, overlapping and intershocked. Keith knows fights the way old men know bad weather, and this one's been knotting up clouds since they hauled the witch back, since Allura dragged her wrists from her long Galran sleeves, snapped a shining silver manacle over the bone—since the fight across the throne room of Lotor's flagship when bayard struck an arm of Galra steel, and a gold-eyed laughing shadow had twisted and spilled away to mist through his clawing fingers.

 _Forty-six days._

After, he'd remembered to count. Forty-six days—just one more fact to cling to the edges of their battle like a thorn, bloodied and meaningless, a road winding to nowhere. At the time, the world had only been a string of battles to win: another disappearance. Adrenaline thrumming fit to pierce and unravel his veins. A siege. _How many times are you—_ Prince Lotor's flagship cornered in an asteroid ring's worth of debris. 

The Yellow Lion tore through the ship's reinforced walls—but in the throne room, only a single hooded figure stood warped and waiting, the light of Lotor's teleportation still a brilliant stain across her palms. 

_I want to tell you a secret._

His breaths are churning shallow, mouth breaking to an ugly splintered line, brows stitching dark. He swallows against memory and its cluttering, bitter rust. "Look. You said it yourself—she's too powerful to be trusted. She could be staying on-board just to spy on us. Lotor's the one we need to deal with right now. If we can't use her, there's no point keeping her around."

"It's quite remarkable how you can make the most difficult of situations sound simple to solve."

"What," Keith says, even and gutting, "is your _problem_?"

Too sharp, too loud. A shadow flashes by the crux between hallways—Slav, all knotted-up twitching and owl-round staring, firing off a red-veined glare before he scurries out of sight. He's kind of afraid of Keith, Hunk told him once, wry with sympathetic envy—feels about him the way every statistician must about constant miracles under a bell curve. 

But Allura's never been moved by odds or storms or her own recruits before. She clasps her hands before her. "You've hardly looked at me," she says, quieter, "since Shiro left us."

In the cockpit she's lifted her head just like that, before: a slim figure in that scalded-flush paladin's suit, her steps chiming up the lion's ramp like she'd been born to take its stride. She'd run vivid sequences across each console and the Blue Lion had roared to her touch. There they were, Voltron remade: Lance awash in red light and Allura's clear-eyed judgment shining through every screen and the Black Lion's tension like a cage all around him—

His shoulders bunch against a lost battle's adrenaline—its invisible, crackling impulse. "I'm looking at you right now," Keith says. "You look like you're in my way."

"I won't allow you to make your own decisions about our most valuable hostage," Allura says, clear and cold. "If you see that as pitting myself against you, Keith—then so be it."

"The longer we leave her alone, the more she's going to think we _can't_ do anything to her."

"We cannot be certain of _anything_ she thinks! Haggar was Zarkon's right hand for thousands of deca-phoebs—she betrayed her own planet for him. But she's too valuable to be set free." Her voice steadies; her fingers lace as if against the impulse to wrap around his throat. "Our war has two fronts. Neither is safer than the other. Zarkon is a monster and a dictator, and we cannot predict when he'll take control again. Lotor may be able to access fewer resources than his father, but we have little information when it comes to his goals. At this moment, our only advantage is that we have imprisoned an important resource for both."

She could go on—Allura's had a lot of practice in turning strategy into excuses. He twists to step past her, but she sways into his path again, dark-eyed and alien, a force in her own right. "You promised, Keith," she says. "You promised to put Voltron's mission above all else. Even if Haggar had any answers for you—what do you imagine you could do to buy her trust?"

Draw a knife until its edge burns red. Close his hands around her throat, wring tight. Brace his knuckles and knees against the floor; bend his head, and beg for it.

But that's no answer.

"I don't know," he says. His throat aches, rusting without answers. "But whatever it takes—I'll do it. I have to."

"Begin by convincing _me_ , then," Allura says, sharp and clear. " _Control yourself_."

His head jerks up; he crowds forward until her step sputters back along the tile. "Move," Keith says, low, and the Red Lion burns in his sound.

It's the wrong demand. Fury folds into her skin, and then she's only a girl again, a polished, familiar face beneath the invisible crown. She roots her heels along the floor, contrary; her jaw whitens, ticking against the shame. "It isn't that I don't understand how you feel, Keith," she says. "We _will_ bring Shiro back. The _true_ Shiro. You must trust in that."

He knows grief—learned its false radiant halo of privacy over a desert summer, the bowing weight of ghosts too personal for anyone else to carry. That's never been true. People leave footsteps, smear memories across corners and clean lines like fingerprints, trail echoes everywhere they go. He's not alone in this; the castle's shaking, still, with its new loss. 

But there's still one difference between them, marrow-deep.

"You're just saying that," Keith says. "You think he's gone for good this time."

"I'm telling you what I'd like to believe." The patience's withered out of her with her roiling fury, left her staring in place. "We've hardly had any time to recover from one paladin's loss through the grace of the lions—but we can hardly count on them to show mercy again. I'll say it as many times as I need to—Voltron would be past salvaging if we lost you, too. I don't mean only the lions., Keith," she says, softer. "Please—you must see that. Shiro would never ask you to sacrifice so many others in vain, chasing someone who can't be found."

 _Shiro would never._ It's easy to pack your wishes into the mouths of the vanished, who can't spit it out. But this is Shiro—worse to think that he alone hadn't known what Shiro'd wanted, that he must take these echoes from every other mouth. 

"No," Keith says. "I guess he wouldn't."

Sympathy as a weapon—it's funny how only people with hearts do that.

Allura's settled again, clear-eyed and close. "For us to keep Haggar prisoner, we must be able to trust one another before her. I want to trust you, Keith. Will you let me?"

"You heard her," he says, though he doesn't mean to, though it spills out of him like shrapnel, all the half-protests and pieces he's swallowed over weeks gouging out of his lungs. "She was—taunting us. Whatever happened, whatever got Shiro onto Lotor's ship, wherever he _went_ after that—she was part of it. I can't let that go."

"No one's asked you to let him go," Allura says, and her voice is a silver knife to core out his ribs. "I ask only that you take responsibility for your current position. You took up flying the Black Lion in Shiro's absence before. Until we can confirm his current whereabouts, that responsibility still falls to you. Answer me: will you manage it? Or not?"

He bows his head. "Fine," he says. 

"Fine?"

It grits in his teeth like poison. "I won't go back. You can handle Haggar from now on."

"Thank you, Keith."

"No. You don't understand—you have to _try_. As long as you're working to try to get information from Haggar, I'll lead Voltron. Don't interfere with me, and I won't interfere with you."

"Keith—"

The ice cracks with a snarl, animal, all his viciousness frothing awake. "If you want me to lead, then you have to let me _do it_."

A heartbeat flashes between them. She grinds her heels into steel—but he'd seen the flinch first, and he's already turning away.

To his back, she says, "I do wish you'd understand—that you aren't alone."

"I don't want to talk about it anymore."

"Don't you?"

Keith laughs, an iron-cut sound. "People disappear," he tells the corner. "It's what they do. Of all people—I figured you'd get that by now."

He swings away, keeps walking. She doesn't call him back.  


# *

  
"Almost feels like the bad old days."

This time, he gets it right.

Facts: there's a universe in the Black Lion, waiting only for its paladin's call. A universe is infinite. Infinity contains everything. Once upon a time, out through the farthest reaches of space, a fragment of Takashi Shirogane's memory had called into the dark, and the Black Lion had answered. There's no such thing as a one-way link—not really.

_Come back to me, Shiro._

Sound spins out to stars. A spiral of galaxies sways and frays. In the untethered cage of the Black Lion's dreaming, the universe cracks like an eggshell. Keith doesn't think, doesn't wonder, only _remembers_ , rooting out image after desert-brimming image until they roar to dusty life. It's his voice that comes back first: a steady cadence, summer-warm. His fingers next, long and lean with their sleek, square knuckles. The lock between his brows swaying black-white-black before their lost year shudders between them, waking. The rest comes flooding through in a torrent—his steel arm, his bow-taut shoulders, a bronze-heavy brow and pupils shocked black, his frame still bowed to the weight of a paladin's armor stripped and gone, and—

On an imaginary dune in a lion's dream, stars trickling beneath the heels of his hands, Shiro stares at him.

"Keith," he says, shocked raw. 

Keith barrels into him.

They're a jumble that way, the kind of tumult that'll work itself into a snarl of memory, fingertips scrawling and scrabbling at all the wrong points, all _how_ and _are you okay? tell me if you can feel this_ and _you have to tell me what happened_ , breathing in the ghostly dust between his shoulder and throat. His answers overlap the questions—Keith does the best he can with his fingers grinding along the black of Shiro's knuckles, colors stinging in a swarm beneath his lashes. _A heavy-bellied flagship, yellow eyes, metal roaring bitter and bright against the bayard's blade._

But the picture's formed and resting, its resin crackling dry. A little dust makes no difference. Shiro takes shape and a haunted-new world comes spinning after him: dune after dune unraveling into a dusty horizon. Stark against the silver-smudged dusk, the Garrison stands alone, a little less than a shadow and a little more than a stone.

He's dreaming, or he isn't. Shiro's with him. The rest's just details.

Time ticks to a different measure inside the Black Lion. One heartbeat holds for hours. For once, they have more time than the world can contain—all the time worth keeping in dreams.

_You need the rest, Shiro. Just take it easy for a while._

They go star-chasing. Shiro remembers Earth's sector pretty well, and Keith can map their way through the run. _Just work with me,_ he tells the Black Lion, and fresh dunes surge out of some flicker of shadowed memory, a winding road and the sky fanned out over them. Around them, the world's a compacted constellation. Stars glitter in the dust where they fan their fingers, sky and sand alike; stars spangle the concrete of the roadside, puff and seep their grit into the soles of his boots as he strides along. Down the crumbling road, he can see a jeep slouching like an old tomb, scraped metal and paint in curling splinters, another constellated dune in a desert stretching boundless and bare. 

On some dandelion-whim, Shiro crouches; he sinks his fingers into the grit and puffs dust through the glittering night. Keith laughs.

They wander like Garrison flyboys on reckless, unofficial leave, marveling at the world remade. Shiro's stride cuts silver through the shadow; his knuckles swing like pearl. They stop at an unreal, pearl-cut crest swept with a silvery dusk; propping themselves up on stones pale as opal, they count constellations. Stars sweep out beneath Shiro's expert eye.

Keith squints up. "I think you put Ursa Minor in the wrong quadrant."

"You know," Shiro says, "I took the same classes that you did. And I did pretty well in them."

"You took those _years_ ago. You wouldn't be counting on old grades if you actually remembered anything useful."

Shiro sprawls back, scudding stars down the hazy dunes. "You know what they say," he remarks. "Coordinates or no ordinances, cadet."

Keith's squint deepens. "They don't say that. _No one_ says that. That doesn't even rhyme."

"Sounds like someone's stalling."

"Well, it takes one to know one." But memory beckons, and in heartbeats, he's drawing up his knees. His head snaps skywards before Shiro opens his mouth. "Right ascension from 8.41 AM to 10.54 PM, declination from 65 to 90 degrees, quadrant NQ3. That means it should be—there."

Lines filter through with his voice, a diagram fit to carve up the sky; their netting throbs silver, counting to a human pulse, then evaporate. 

In the silence, Keith cocks his head. His eyes lid; his mouth crooks, all wicked victory.

"All right," Shiro says, rueful and caught out. He scrubs at his hair and looks up as if to measure the sky. It's the same rueful gesture that he's made a hundred times before in Garrison spaces: propped against battered, rust-eaten desks, watching motes spin across a projector's light, or in a little plastered box of a dorm room. "Actually, I'm not sure I see it. Can you map the rest of them?"

Keith looks at him—and knocks him into the dirt. 

Across the dirt they tumble, scattering stars and quicksilver clods. Keith nearly plants a knee in Shiro's thigh. A galaxy of sand shivers down his spine as his elbows bristle, grappling against Shiro's greater weight before they give way. He lands with his back in the dirt, and then Shiro's braced over him, a figure drawn in caught stars.

"Hey," he says, all laughter and familiar light. 

Keith jerks. In his ears roars the same voice, a confessional rush left days and hours and weeks back. _The Black Lion isn't responding to me. It looks like you're its true paladin now._ In the black paladin's armor, one man looks much like another; a shadow had walked with his same unfaltering stride, presses his fingers to his nape in the same old way, remarks in the same voice, fit to lash across the bridge, _you're being irresponsible—just for once, can you think of someone else's safety?_

He swallows. "Shiro," he says. "I need you to tell me the last thing you remember from outside."

The constellations blink, startled.

"Outside?" Shiro says, too slow. He pulls back; his head bows over his filigreed frame as if to count the stars and shadows layere dover his palms. "I don't—really know. Zarkon was trying to overtake the Black Lion. She told me to use my bayard. But—somehow, it feels like a lot of time's passed since then."

 _Then just—nothing._

This isn't right. He knows those lines—heard them drawn hoarse through dim light, breath by aching breath, and if he listens, if he keeps running through a script long worn to rags, maybe he'll hear—

_How many times are you going to have to save me before this is over?_

A shout clusters in his throat, bell after alarm bell stringing taut. Keith sits up—digs the heels of his hands against the sand, staring down.

"Keith." A palm dusts his shoulder, faint as sand pattering. "Everything all right?"

In the desert he'd dreamed of this, breathing in dust, losing details by handfuls: the cadence of his _good morning_ , the way he always reeked like salt and sun after a run, the swinging curl that'd knock over Shiro's brow no matter how he tousled it back. Hand clasps knuckles, and for a heartbeat, maybe, warmth flashes between them, thin as an autumn morning, before he turns back.

But there's only stillness shining through Shiro's fingertips.

Shiro reaches up, brushes his dusty fingertips across Keith's cheek, just the way he'd dreamt it, once. "Keith," he says.

Keith turns his head, pushes himself to his feet in rusting degrees. "That's my question," he says.

Shiro stays down, but his head cocks. "You're pretty worried for someone talking to me through the healing pod communications," he remarks, light but wry, the kind of easy blow that's meant to be taken or turned aside. He glances skyward, and his gaze seems to skim the constellations out of the sky. The haze clears, clouds withering and clearing in great sloping petals as new worlds roll into view. A gaiacentric universe, a few thousand years too late. "This is a lot fancier than I remember from my last visit. Did Coran rig something up?"

A silence, too raw not to be transparent. Helpless, Keith looks and keeps looking—studies the crooked mouth, the quirk of his brows, the fine shadows creeping over his jaw. 

The faint pixellation at the edges of every vein.

"You'll be fine," he says, like he's telling it to something real. "You're coming back soon. It's just a while longer—"

"Hey," Shiro says, no louder than a shadow, no warmer than a dream. The smile's left him, but his grave eyes are coaxing bright. "I know. You've got me." 

Keith's mouth pinches, but he sinks down. Together they wait, two ghosts in an imagined memory, to watch the night go out star by star.  


# *

  
_My father said that we must be kind to prisoners._

_If we are to emerge from war as the people who entered it, we cannot treat those captured so very differently than we would treat our own people. Since the beginning of war, it has been the principle of fighting that our enemies will stand for everything we cannot bear and live; but if we are to build any resolution for the coming peace, we must begin in our worst moments. So he said, often and again._

_But this is no longer my father's war._

Battle by battle, the paladins win the field. 

Allura knows this play. Lotor has talent and a new conqueror's ambition, but his empire's a territory stitched out of his father's fear-woven territories and his own silk-thread claims, frayed thinner still by constant treacheries. Zarkon's faction has turned against him. His alliances are constantly shifting, and it's as much a weakness as it is an advantage: the Voltron Coalition, at least, can count on its forces. His only strength is the loyalty he commands—and in Zarkon's empire, that's no better than empty hands.

Voltron learns new formations, learns to take advantage of stellar anomalies for stealth and subterfuge. In a tandem flight alongside the gaudy bulletships of the Elentri, they shatter a squadron that Lotor had trained himself in childhood where it'd been left to seethe and swarm over a quiet golden spiral. They retake a galaxy by way of a shattering new bomb which webs from ship to ship courtesy of the Green Lion's subterfuge; and when they descend to land, the saved sling themselves weeping to their feet.

Victory after victory—and yet the empire's _pro tem_ heir remains shadowless, nowhere to be found.

_And so I ask you now: will you trust me? Will you listen to me?_

What's massing under her command is the kind of force that her father would have approved—but this is no longer a strength which wins wars. Her father, her grandfather, and all of the kings before then had won their wars battle by battle—fought to prove their mettle and hauled their enemies to negotiate. The greater days, when they'd only had a single world to shield.

Lance and Coran argue longest, crowing and slinging arguments against her steely conviction. Pidge twists her head away when Allura glances in her direction, neither ally nor defender. Hunk taps his blunt forefingers together and stares at his screen. Keith gets up and walks out as the argument thrashes into new throes—and every voice withers with his fading shadow.

If Voltron's leader won't oppose her, there's no other answer.

_Then hear my command._

In a better world, he would have known his role—would have taken up his mantle as she had her own. But she's known his answer since the Blades of Marmora bent the knee before him, their military rows laid out in her white hangar—knew him from the first moment he signed out the Red Lion for night patrols months back. His hands were made to circle a weapon, not a crown. 

For another voice, or in another life, perhaps he'd have tried. But forgiveness is not a cure-all: it doesn't stir feeling where the earth's scorched dry. She hasn't Shiro's heart, Hunk's kindness. She's led them, fought with them—she knows them too well to tell herself anything else.

They know each other, and so she'll stop him before Voltron falters with his weakness. He won't forgive her for that. 

And so: alone, Allura walks. Night's cored the castle to its heart: Coran's docked it into solid orbit around a young star gaudy and haloed with dust, light without worshippers, a planetless system too new to claim. Its allies were left systems back; gone are the everlasting thrum of its shields and alerts. Through its emptied halls she goes, trailing each corner as if in search of old ghosts, stepping sharp to crowd out the whispers of bright lives long blown to ash— out the hangar's transport and down, down, down to the castle's lowest level, where the Blue Lion coils in wait.

Floors reel by in flashes, darkening and skewing: here a sliding door left to sway and dangled, there a streak where white flakes and drips from the thorn-run walls, shadows crawling and bloating as if to some monster's stride—

The transport eases into the floor. Forward Allura steps into the hangar. The doors slam shut behind her.

In the lions' white chamber, the scattered damage's writhed to life. Rafters slope like dead veins; an alcove's warped and smeared as if with human scratching. By the escape pod, a silhouette wheels to meet her sound.

Haggar considers the walls and empty alcoves with an animal's blank intent. The manacles flicker and writhe about her wrists—but dull back to arcane metal again, unchanged. The pieces fly together. "A pretty trick for a princess," she says.

Even a witch, it seems, can be chained.

"I wanted the opportunity to speak to you properly."

"To speak?" Haggar says. "Or to beg?"

The bait writhes between them, fat and transparent; Allura leaves it for the silence to cradle. She risks a step. Another. "You must know that Lotor cannot live up to Zarkon's legacy—nor can the universe support the empire's tyranny for much longer. He stands no chance against us. You protect nothing by withholding."

Haggar cocks her head. Her hair slides and webs over her shoulders. Overhead the lights surge and plunge in a wave. "Threats were always a guard's work in Altea, if I recall... Has this generation of paladins abandoned you so soon?"

"Concern yourself with what's before you," Allura says, unwavering. "Haggar. I'm offering to negotiate."

"But I see nothing before me yet, princess."

 _Princess, princess_. On a traitor's bedizened tongue, the title is nothing but a mockery. Allura keeps her fingers fanned frail and loose; her attention fixed on Haggar's shadow. "If I believed that you had any interest in a true alliance, I would offer you anything you asked. We recognise now that the Galra Empire _must_ retain some portions of territory for the next few centuries. It's been simply too long since the subjugation of their peoples; they no longer recall their own cultures, and to remove your influence would destabilise them. Isn't that incentive enough?"

"Enough," Haggar says. "To go from an empire to the pittance granted by the slightest _pests_ of the galaxy?"

"You're still Altea's prisoner. Whatever tricks Lotor may be drawing against us, they won't last against Voltron. You've seen that for yourself."

Silence.

"I've tried to give you time to come to your own conclusions," Allura says. Her eyes flash up, steel-bright. "But if you won't offer your diplomacy on our behalf, there's still one other way in which we can use your assistance."

She breathes three words, words that her father had schooled into her teeth—words that she'd whispered into the manacles when they'd dragged the witch to her feet. The metal clicks, yawning open.

Haggar turns back.

The floor tilts—the lights reel and snarl in a nonsense orbit overhead. _Impact_ —but the thought comes hurtling long after the fact. Pain grinds into her teeth; every bone blares with it, a hollowness that crowds up through her spine and floods her ribcage, tighter, tighter—and Allura staggers forward into a world scraped white, half-numb beneath the sheer weight of bruises ringing shrill all at once. Her fingers flex; her knuckles clench, stringing tendons back to movement as every nerve and instinct sings her on to _shift to something greater, something denser, the better to take the next blow—_

The air churns like static. Haggar's smile _cracks_ across the floor, felt as lightning.

Allura flexes a wrist, thinks _change, heal and be whole_. A cry slips between her teeth—but she grates back the rest as bruises stipple and blossom over her skin in a gaudy riot. Her wrist keeps its shape even as it throbs.

A curse, triggered by shapeshifting. Of course—Haggar had been Altean once, too.

"So young," Haggar says, in open, deliberate thought. "So confident in her powers to make an offer she can't afford. I'm too old—I'm afraid this is all that I have left to offer."

A lamp shatters. The hangar roars with a new wildfire surge, _racing_ towards her. Reflex drags her shoulders into a flinch; her nerves pull taut—

Allura opens her eyes.

The bolt's thrumming above her head, caught mid-strike, a witch's lightning wound into a halo, close enough to leash or shatter. Electricity could not have been so readily quelled; a chemical reaction wlould have caught her whole—but a witch's alchemy answers to no laws and no true loyalties. It only exists to be commanded.

She reaches up; her hand knuckles in its pearling light. 

Elsewhere, perhaps, Haggar might have had the advantage—but the castle will always be her territory. Everything in its walls is hers to claim.

"This," Allura says through her teeth, and feels a witch's force force shivering black down through her jaw, "should be more than enough."

With her single freed hand, Haggar lashes back. Together they move across the floor, blow after blow, sorceries layering one over the next. The shock of each new blow rings mint in her eyelashes, clumps thick in her mouth, belling, golden, sweet as black oil. A whirlwind comes snarling, spinning up from around Haggar's feet—and _shatters_ against the circle that Allura draws in the empty air, its pieces dissolving to mist.

She breathes in—and feels the trap's teeth too late. Every scrap of marrow in her bones comes singing alive to the shock in the sibilant, painstruck language of poison. The force field spills into dust. Allura staggers: back, back, crumpling into a heap.

Haggar's shadow sweeps over her as she kneels; the silence curls with her lip. Her steps hiss past, stretching along the floor as Allura heaves into the empty white. Through the haze she registers it: the witch's shadow's smearing one of the smaller pneumatic tubes—stopped at its fibreglass with a gaze that holds too long to be merely considering its empty platform. The air whispers with a witch's static, witchery spinning over her fingers into a new storm. 

It stops.

A heartbeat sounds. A rafter groans, and steel comes singing through the air, thunders into the floor just as her shadow stutters out. The air _snaps_ , and feet away, Haggar stumbles back into flesh and color and life. Her lanterned eyes swing from the rubble and back, staring as Allura heaves her weight onto a new spear, still silvery with the light of its summons. 

"There is no antidote to your powers," she says. Blood froths at the back of her throat, but she catches and swallows the salt: an Altean warrior shows no weakness before enemies. "So I've had every device in this room keyed to weld shut on an incorrect code entry. The Paladins are currently orbiting the castle; in the event of my defeat, they will carry on the Coalition without me. In the same case, I've granted Coran permission to make a remote detonation of the castle. Your only road to freedom lies through me."

Silence.

Haggar flings her head back; her laughter chimes in peals, thin and shrill as a bird's warning cry. "Didn't your little black guard claim that _Voltron_ wouldn't threaten my life? I thought you had a use for me, princess."

There's no subtlety to her, this figure tarnished by centuries of her own poisons, this shadow whose bloody squalor swallowed all her alchemist's splendor. King Alfor, perhaps, might have found the right words to unlock her cast-iron, some antidote to the venom that slavers from her witch's jaws. But Allura's stranded and grown, and this war is hers alone to wage and win. She knows all that she's ever needed.

There's no cooperation to coax from an unrepentant Galra. But there is another way.

"To the victor goes the spoils, " she says, in an executioner's clear voice. "That is the Galra way, isn't it? If you refuse to help me of your own accord, I'll win the rights to your aid."

Haggar turns towards her, pacing around her in a crippled circle.

The spear jolts in her grip. Alone, Allura lunges into Haggar's wild-eyed, widening smile.  


# *

  
Lesson: a witch is—  
1\. ugly;  
2\. a traitor to physics and flesh;  
3\. an obstacle, a necessary sacrifice for the hero's triumph;  
4\. a woman.  


# *

  
"Allura!"

Sound out of silence: an unforgiving alchemy. The doors open; the bridge blossoms with shouts. In an outpoured instant, they're swarming to meet her. Victory spins lights and color back into the world: a green-striped collar, an orange headband which flares like a conqueror's banner, Pidge and Hunk and Lance and _Coran_ , first and always, helmets cast aside and their spacesuits still hissing to adjust, chattering brittle as a flock around her as she sways through the doors.

She swallows: once and again; at her vision's edge, the colors spiral and riot, then settle again. "I'm quite all right," Allura says. She staves off Hunk's solid shoulder and Pidge's arm where it crooks at her waist to bearher up—but Pidge lifts her chin, and Allura startles as Pidge knots a fist over her outstretched fingers, just an instant's bristling comfort, _be okay_ , before she sinks into the piloting seat. 

Her fingers fumble at the wound knot at her nape. She tugs out each pin, unwinds the loop, shakes out her hair in a sweat-clumped cloud. Stripped of their maps and strategems, the windows reframe the system: an empty orbit circling a dusty new star. 

For an instant, the universe is no more than pinprick constellations.

"At rest, Paladins," Allura says.

"Where is she?"

At the secondary console, Keith folds his arms. His eyes sweep her as if to pan for sparks of witchery leftover, any stray flashes of gold. She lifts her head. A swallow creases her papery skin; her fingers flex as if over a spear's stem, but catch only empty air.

Too loud, Lance says, "You mean the _princess_?" 

At once, Keith's gaze snaps over. "I was talking about—"

"Oh, trust me, everyone gets what you were talking about, Keith. I'm saying that maybe you should just take a second, flip that _mullet_ out of your eyes, and look at what's right in front of you before you ask questions. She's—"

"More than capable," Allura says, "of holding my own." She laces her fingers in her lap, as if to tie herself into stillness. "She told me a great deal before we—were forced to return her to her cell."

The silence holds while she arranges herself. Proper procedure flickers on her tongue, thin as water. She must remember: here, she has a report to make. The castle's taken the brunt of several assaults, fended off only by the collective efforts of children no bigger than herself, by a lion tethered to her only by a boy's request. 

They've served her well. Friends or not, she owes them no less.

"You must understand," she says, and hears the slow, tensing current of her command tiding high. "The Galra were the longest-lived part of the alliance even ten thousand deca-phoebs ago. But Zarkon has extended his life by mass-harvesting quintessence. For centuries, it seems he's been drawing it from each planet he conquered, storing it, and dispensing it where he deemed that it would be most useful. Until recently, he was never able to store it for long in anything other than another planet. He was in the process of mobilising the forces for their transportation when Voltron defeated him. It remains very much the source of his strength, but it isn't bound to him. Anyone with the power and the knowledge could take advantage of its strength. He guarded its secrets jealously."

Pidge's hefted herself onto the console, anchors a fist by the main control panel. "So that's Lotor's goal," she says, and Allura nods to her. 

"His primary concern for the next several deca-phoebs will be the empire's consolidation. Galra society is," but word after word only flickers in her mouth, distasteful in its bitter, bound strictures, " _barbaric_. It won't be enough for them that Lotor is Zarkon's rightful heir—it's likely that a few of the old commanders will challenge him to improve their own positions while he's still adjusting. He'll have his work cut out in proving his worth. Haggar claims that she's been told of his plans. He intends to draw quintessence from eight of the planets in which Zarkon stored his reserves. Should he fail—" An ache sweeps the words from her teeth and she stutters; her fingers tighten against her ribs before she carries on. "He won't have the strength both to hold onto his throne and to conquer new territory without support."

"Did she give you any names?"

"She did not—but the movements of Zarkon's primary flagship have been thoroughly tracked."

Her fingers race through a sequence worn shining across the console's spread. An automated keypad turns over at its far end, fanning wide into a constellation of dials as a new array of galaxies spiral through every window, star-maps flickering alive on every screen. Under her tapping, new screens unfurl, spilling out to a riot of glassy stars. 

The paladins have bracketed her, waiting: Hunk and Pidge's face, round and narrow with the same focus—Lance already setting his shoulders to move forward. Coran nodding to her as her father's advisors would have. 

"If we can confirm the data with our new allies," Allura says, "we need only trace these trails back through the systems. Zarkon was in no hurry when he traveled; Voltron should be able to take these trails much more quickly. Once we're close, we can detect any quintessence in the area."

Lance claps once, chafes his palms through a hiss and stretches in a brilliant crack, the very image of a hero rising to his fate. "So all we have to do is play X-marks-the-spot and pull the treasure out of there before him, right? Piece of cake!"

"How?"

Every eye swings to Keith, arms still folded where he stands. Tension's seeded down his jaw, brambling thick with his swallow. "She didn't tell you how to get the quintessence out of those planets," he says, "did she."

A word bristles in Allura's teeth; she clenches it in a knuckling hand as her chair turns to his station. "Our battle ended before I had the chance. When she wakes, I can—"

"Listen to me," he says, the boy standing at the prison again: a soldier standing against an obstacle. "You _aren't_ Shiro. You don't have to push yourself that far."

What a loaded answer. Allura stares, lost histories seething in her teeth. "As I've told you before, Keith," she says. "You've made our respective duties quite clear."

_You are in no position to command me._

"You just said it. It took Zarkon ten thousand years to make the kind of tech that could transport quintessence. We know Lotor must have some—but unless we steal it off of his ship, we only have one choice."

Keith always talks as if _communication_ exists in binaries: speak or don't, a universe's worth of understanding distilled down to morse code. He doesn't feel the brunt of himself, clawing words run to iron beneath the Red Lion's fuming temper. His voice commands, dares, and the bait curdled between them: _if you're going to lead us, you better prove me wrong._ Lance has stood against him, now and again—but then, it'd been Lance who woke the Blue Lion. It's a different matter to settle into the old cockpit seat, to know that she was never meant to ride, to _demand_ a place. 

"Hold on a sec." Pidge lifts her head, jaw hard and pale beneath her rounded glasses. "Are you talking about destroying those planets?"

Hunk's first to crack; his laugh churns in nervous thunder. "Nah, Keith wouldn't! He's always talking about how we have to do the _right_ thing, he's just building up the suspense! Right, Keith?" His eyes sling from face to face, rounding. "Right?"

Keith jerks his head. "If that's what it takes."

Silence.

Lance pipes up first, and his shrill, sour objection swells to a shout as Pidge snaps something, too. The frail, misty peace shatters beneath the weight of tempers overlapping, every voice ringing out at once. Hunk's snagging Lance's arm— Pidge's still propped over the command panel. "You've got to be _kidding_ me," she 's saying, harsh above the fray. "Matt's still out there—my _dad's_ supposed to be in a _camp_ somewhere. We're not hitting any planets until—"

"Now, now—" Coran's voice trills, a majordomo's expertise. "The Black Paladin's command is _traditional_. It's only fair that you hear him out to the end—"

"Guys!" Hunk's broad hand clamps on Lance's shoulder, knuckles grinding as strategies flick over his broad face. "Can we calm down? Just for a sec. We're not gonna get anything—"

" _No._ " 

A sharp battering wrenches Lance out of his leashing; alone, he storms forward, pupils blown into something beyond recognition as he reels into Keith's blank-eyed mask. "Not this time. Pidge is right. I thought destroying the universe was supposed to be the _Galra's_ job, Keith. What's next? Do you want to take Voltron apart too? You've got the Black Lion now, so at least it'd be easy for you. Or maybe you should let Haggar out of her cell, since I guess we're _all_ doing that now."

Word after word bolts its shocks up Keith's spine. He wheels. "We're not just Galra—this is for the universe, Lance!"

He ought, Allura thinks, to have known better—but then, Keith of all the paladins has always carried the least potential for subtlety. Lance has been waiting for this fight since they came out of the final battle—a nervy boy with a bone-deep loathing for loose ends and half-way victories. Uncertainty's dug deep roots in him, and somewhere in the dark it grew thorns. 

"Oh, great," Lance says. He bolts, stride after stride into Keith's anchored temper: his chin juts with the defiance of something uglier than fear. "Seriously, is that our excuse now? Even _Zarkon_ was trying to save something, remember?"

"You don't believe that," Keith says. "Even if he thought he had reasons, _any_ reason—he's been killing and enslaving people for thousands of years. He doesn't have that excuse anymore."

"That's not the point!" Lance's arm swings to the silverlit window, embroidered with constellations. Frustration cracks through his voice, the brutal, brimming edge of an unfluent tongue trying to batter its way into another language. He's never known how to talk to Keith—only one of them ever has. "I haven't seen _Earth_ in a year, Keith. That doesn't mean that I'd let anyone wreck it. It's my _home_ , man. Do you get that? We don't get to make that decision for other people!"

"Someone has to," Keith says, low and knifing. "Do you want it to be us, or do you want it to be the Galra?"

Lance hisses through his teeth. "I know who _you_ want it to be," he says. "You really think that you're doing what—"

" _Lance_."

But she's spoken too late—Keith's already lashed across the last little distance between them, feral as an animal breaking leash. Lance stutters back by steps as Keith crowds into his space, fists swinging. "Say his name."

Lance's eyes are jittering wild. "What?"

Hunk tenses, but Pidge seizes his wrist. Allura braces along the pale console; her fingertips tremble like shadows across the white. The fight's swelled too far to be choked back, and this is not the kind of poison meant for riding out in fevers and choking.

There's nothing she can do.

"You were going to say something, right?" Keith says, notes above a snarl. "I know you get scared, but I didn't realise it was that easy. _Finish it._ "

"Fine," Lance says. His jaw pulls tight; resolve cuts through him like steel. "You miss Shiro. We get it. That doesn't mean you get to _kill planets_ until everybody hurts like you do."

The hull rushes with his silence. 

"Yeah. That's what I figured," Keith says, and spins for the door.

"Keith," Hunk says—his voice the only one to rise, teetering on the brink of forbidden sympathy.

The pneumatic mechanism hisses, and Keith stops between the doors. "I'm not doing this for Shiro—I'm doing this because there's no other way. And if you don't want to make the hard choice, _I will_. We'll save as much as we can. We can evacuate them like we did the Balmera. But if blowing up eight planets is what it takes to get rid of the Galra Empire once and for all, we're going to do it. All right?"

Lance stares across the floor. His fists knuckle white.

"Fine," he says. "but we get every single one of the inhabitants off the planet, or you can find another red paladin while you're at it."  


# *

  
They go on.

Trailing Zarkon, the castle drifts deeper into the empire, through dead systems circling an extinguished black sun and sectors long charred out of rebellions. Wormhole travel, Kolivan tells them during a brief transmission, must be restricted for another six days. 

Lance burns through his wait in an easy sling: he bends his head to Allura and Slav and their trickling collection of nameless shy refugees, whines through a new slough of chores with Coran; he winds and weaves his way into any thread of a conversation he can take without looking at Keith. Hunk knots himself into a rounded shadow, hovering after him with his shoulders bunched hard as wings. Coran harangues them all still like a man who's forgotten the war: he busies himself in the kitchen, tugging at old programs and mechanisms to stir to new recipes, buffing the floors after visitors stream by, shepherding the guests who come abroad for shelter or introductions, all the standard duties of any majordomo. He's the easiest to avoid.

With her usual singular approach, Pidge builds a programming shelter at her station on the bridge: a haphazard construct that consists of discarded projectors and hardware covers piled one over the other. It's the kind of absent-minded nest that coders and cadets used to build in the Garrison halls during finals, just before the rankings for the payload specialization came out—though Earth engineers had never littered their shelters with such strange devices and lights, or wired its entryway with a leering throb of some silicon-knotted alarm. 

Only Slav's allowed to stoop inside, to talk to her outside of meals. 

Planet by planet, they unearth the names for each cored world where Zarkon stored quintessence: Algagri, Plumecks, Elruths, and more in an outpouring too bound-up in segmented limb gestures for human tongues to pronounce. Between meetings, they look out for each other still: Coran retools each pneumatic closet, welds and stitches the holes from their armor. Hunk leaves plates for Pidge out of dinner. He snags Keith's elbow as he's stalking down from the holodeck to put him on Pidge-feeding watch for the next five hours, but to offer her the plate only if she comes out. 

The ship bridge's been largely deserted in the aftermath. From time to time, he slouches against the wall of her programming just to listen to the hum. He gets the feeling that she knows he's out there; from time to time, when the star-maps have shut down for the night, simulations of the Garrison go reeling across the farthest glass: snapshots of a desert laid bare by night, abandoned light-years back.

The Blades come and go from the castle's hangar on slim, bat-wing ships, bringing to the bridge reports of treachery and opportunities for new alliances. He still doesn't _get_ the difference between their masks and armoring, but there's always a figure to command and second every detail. Kolivan comes much rarer, but he's always waiting on the training deck when the Blades are on-board. Sometimes they take a flurrying host of battle simulations at once, Kolivan fighting with the simplicity of gutting experience.

He fights, but he doesn't guard. Time and again, Keith tumbles to the floor, struck by a blow to his spine, the backs of his knees. He learns to make the best of it—rolls across the tiles and springs up, or waits just long enough to slam a heel into the throat of an opponent rushing in.

"Good," Kolivan says after every session; but he turns away, too.

It doesn't matter.

In the worst of the castle's silences, he still has the dream: a crystal-spun desert where the Black Lion's rumble rolls like another pulse, where an old friend stands waiting with a silvery smile.

It's hard to know how the sidetrips start. Maybe the Garrison's the only place in his skull that'll ever carry answers enough; maybe it grew out of the shadow of some red rock. Rootless, answerless, it looms tall over their star-watching, burns quiet as a homecoming signal whenever they strip away the asteroids to sink back to earth. Out of galaxies and shattering stars, Keith dreams his way down to a desert lined with stars, or the Garrison's walls glittering as they never had before. They wander through memories, one by one, pillaging old haunts, shining bucaneers on memory's high seas.

They build strategies sometimes: the Black Lion's a contradiction in dimensions, her cockpit here-not-here, real-and-elsewhere in the same double-vision. Shiro maps a field pocked with asteroids into the galaxies between their feet; he tosses a home-run stretch that skirts a black hole, a series of constellations, piecing together some sure footing through the lion's ravaged, fragmented topography. In some filtered, filmy version of the cockpit he knows, Keith twists the Black Lion through every course, learning her speed, her weapons, one after another with Shiro's hand shining warm between his shoulderblades. 

Sometimes he gets it wrong.

Somewhere in the bright fall into the Black Lion's dreamscape, between the motion and the act, he wakes up—and he's stumbling through a curving, overwrought flagship, like a cathedral crushed into a crescent. Corridor wends into corridor, and he's barreling forward, racing because he must, across floors thrumming with the metallic singing of engines surging. The whispers of weeks chase his shadow: _whatever they did to him must've been huge. He's not acting like himself, Keith—can't you tell?_

He knows this silence, he's been through these pounding steps—and still his body's thrumming on auto, clambering up the sharp-cut steps onto an escalating platform which pulls him up, at last, into a vast chamber, blaze dout of its lurid violets into white. The space's bigger than a ship should allow: pearl-sleek floors which sprawls into the landing of a mountainlike throne inlaid with platinum filigree. 

His target's already waiting.

 _Keith,_ the shadow says.

He runs, reckless and headlong, steps thudding to his marrows like a real pulse. _Shiro—Shiro, what did you_ do _?_

_I can't explain right now—_

_You have to tell me something! Everyone came after you. Kolivan's putting a bounty on your head. You took out all of the Blades of Marmora—we needed them to hold the coalition together. Whatever you're doing—_

_I had to. They were working against us—look._ The shadow braces Keith's shoulders, hard enough that Keith can only flinch beneath his grip, caught in the rhythm of an old memory and a new dream. _I can find the proof I need abroad this ship. But if I'm going to search, then I'll need you to trust me. All right?_

The Black Lion thunders at the back of his skull, then and now, her outrage timeless—but louder's memory. He'd stared, he remembers: traced with his eyes the solid jaw, the surety of a voice he's always known. In the Galra flagship, he'd been an echo, an aching chorus that's only ever known a single line. 

_Never stopped,_ Keith says.

_Good. Just stay here with me for a while._

_Stay here?_ In the thin torchlight. stitched rings and insignia burn along the hem of the long curtains, bruise-black against the cloth; there are balconies, veined and violet, blooming between gold-marbled pillars; their long shadows littered with torches which beat and flicker like eyes. _Are you sure you know what you're doing?_

 _What did I just say about trust?_ It smiles, though its glassy eyes hang blank sorrow-bright—but down his spine scathes the bright, caustic sting of warming steel, a heartbeat's warning before it flares—

" _Keith._ "

The ship's withering back into musty rafters. Shiro's fingers are silvery over his shoulder, a ghost's filigree warmth. He swipes a glance back to the setting, the dreamt memory—but the shadow's already gone. 

"How," he says, and swallows. The word ticks like rust in his ears: here and now, he's awake and dreaming. "How did you get us out of here?"

"I just," Shiro says, and stops. "I just remembered it. This is right, isn't it?"

The Galran chamber's dissolved, walls and shields and steel swept into a handful of dust. Around them rises the Garrison's drab and familiar framing. They're on the restricted level, which Keith remembers as a bureaucratic fortress: a single plodding corridor, walls smeared with the kind of toothless beige that no starlight could crack. Before them, a single door into the archives, a roofless wreck of cabinets fenced from chaos by faded labels. 

"It looks right to me," Keith says, and Shiro's mouth crooks.

"I didn't spend much time up in here—but the memory just swept me up. You think the Black Lion can tell when we get the details wrong?"

"She must be getting it from somewhere," Keith says.

But it veers too close to territory that can't be broached, not yet. Instead, Keith drifts into the room. Shiro stands like a sentry while Keith tests his weight against the rickety glittering of a starry ladder's step. 

He starts climbing.

"Don't break your neck up there," Shiro says. He's slouched against the doorrway, leaning up, grinning as Keith makes it onto a new shelf before he perches, begins to rifle through a box of files. "Are you looking for something specific?"

A folder splays open. Pages flurry from palm to palm, a constellation's worth of answers—but nothing close to what he wants. Showy in dreams, he slings it over a shoulder and listens to its pages bristle and wing and spill over into dust, which evaporates. "I'll tell you if I find it."

"I wonder if there's a dream Iverson somewhere in here."

"Dream demerits," Keith says, deadpan, and digs a silvery, crumpled ball from the back of another box at last. "Sounds deadly."

He jumps down, crouches in a puff of dust. Shiro cocks a brow, but strolls over as he's beckoned.

The page unravels into a scroll: one of the old holoprints reflecting Earth's northern hemisphere, its summer constellations a delicate stitchery across the screen. Shiro whistles, long and low; the sound prickles hairs up Keith's nape. "That's some work. Looks like it's about a decade old."

"They definitely had something like this somewhere back at the Garrison—Mortenson brought one out for a lecture once."

He doesn't say, _I figured you'd like it_ —that much seems to pass without words as he holds it out. Shiro takes it; their fingers brush. Even once he's stretched it wide, he bows his head to keep Keith's view unobstructed. "It'll certainly come in handy when we run the maneuverability drill again tomorrow. Don't worry," he adds, as Keith's mouth shapes outrage. "We've got one more break before then. Should we head out?"

"I've got an idea," Keith says. 

He offers his hand and Shiro takes it. Focus isn't easy, manifesting flesh—but shared dreaming's easier when they're touching. The walls and shelves shimmer, then vanish; instead, they're on a flat white rooftop, with the Garrison's mass curving still behind them. 

Shiro laughs, all bright startlement. At once he's striding across the flat concrete to the barred railing.

"You might not remember this one," Keith tells his back, careful. "I think you spent most of the night cramming for your astrometry eval."

"You'd be surprised how much of you’s memorable. Honestly, I always felt a little bad," Shiro says, soft and wry, "coming up here. This was your spot first."

 _The area’s off-limits to cadets; we don’t want to have to tell you again—_ but he’d chased after it anyway, no better than he’d been at seven years old, toeing along branches and rooftop shingles, step after step with the air knotted in his lungs. Always testing his balance, daring new heights, and waiting, always waiting. Now he breathes in, studies the hologram before him: the bright stroke of his hair, his weight shifting from heel to heel. Real enough. He's run through his battles for the day, trained himself ragged on simulations; he can spare himself enough pity for this.

"It’s not like you were loud."

"True, but I talked to you sometimes. And you talked back."

"There’s only so long that you can look at star charts. At least, there’s a limit for most people."

Nimble as crows, they settle along the rooftop’s edge. Beneath their heels spins the desert's starry stretch, vaster than a human mind should contain. A scattering of thorn-trees crook their bare branches at the filigree horizon, beckoning through the constellated dunes. If he breathes he might taste again the faint spice of the rare grass, thin and sweet as basil. Shiro’s shoulder burns against his. "Five hours, that night—right? I figured you’d get bored."

"I was trying to wait you out," Keith says. "I kept thinking you’d get _hungry_ eventually. But you just stayed up here, reading and reading and reading—"

"Is that why you got so mad?"

"I wasn’t mad."

"You threatened to kick my books off of the roof if we didn’t get off the library grounds."

His throat aches. "Those flight manuals were eighty years old. No one should’ve been teaching out of them."

"I think you'll find that the laws of physics age pretty well," Shiro says, and flashes him an impossible, starry grin. "That's the point of the universe."

It's every inflection that he remembers—dizziness spirals through the backs of his eyes. He remembers this sound, the way Shiro's smile quirks in that same sudden way, strange-familiar and sidelong. But of course the Black Lion had known Shiro, too: his careful hands, his conviction and clear commands. "I could still push you off this roof," he says.

Shiro laughs. "Why do I feel like we've had this conversation before?"

There's only so many conversations you can have in a desert—but that isn't what he means. "It didn't go this way last time. But it was a pretty good night."

"Tell me how you remember it."

Shiro'd have gaps, too, but not like this—not where he'd have to look out for a programmed motive beneath every dragging memory. Keith laughs, and it rattles in his lungs. "I can't."

Silence.

"I'm with you, Keith. I'm not going to leave again." Slower, he says, "Do you believe me?"

Keith stops—but there's no real answer to find. Shiro'd come plunging out of the sky, shivering with flashbacks and electric impulses, gaps in a year drawn loose. What Shiro remembered of him had never mattered before—only that Shiro looked at him with the same unflinching light, fit to core any answer he could ask out of him. In the desert, he'd believed it: scrawling notes to himself in the dark, threading his way into a story that might have never been his, rock etchings and mold. But _wanting_ to believe's a cruelty he can't spare, even for a ghost.

"You were cramming for your final reviews," Keith says. He's turned his back, eyes skimming galaxies. "That night, when I told you I wanted to throw your books off. Most people would’ve started lecturing me about that. _You_ just laughed. We kind of messed around a little. After I finished my physics homework, you let me knock you down—held me down for a minute before I tapped out, and then you just sat with me. Mostly, you told me about your family. You said you’d always wanted a little brother."

"That's a good memory, huh."

Shiro's cocked his head; his smile curls, brimming frail as mercury at the edges, funny and faint and wholly unreadable.

"After we defeated Zarkon, " Keith says, and the words thicken like lead. "We searched for you—all of us did, for weeks. Then Hunk started staying in the kitchen, longer and longer. Pidge said it'd be faster if she could build the right scanning radar, instead of looking ourselves. But even when they weren't searching, they still _missed_ you, Shiro. No one sat in your chair. The castle kept the passcode to your room. There's still a heap of files somewhere—folktales that we picked up from people who traded with the Okari that you wanted to read. It was like the whole castle got hit with bad memories.

And the whole time, I just kept thinking about the Garrison, about everything you said to me. And every time, I'd come back to this night."

Shiro's looking at him, quiet on the sharp cusp of something that can't be named.

"You told me I meant something to you, Shiro," Keith says, helpless. "It’s the best memory I’ve—"  


# *

  
- _got_.

"Keith?"

The intercom flares: a voice like an outraged buzzsaw. Groggy, Keith's head lolls against the seat—and to the figure plastered across his windshield. Lance's crouching along the Black Lion's snout, rapping at the fiberglass. His cheeks puff; his eyes widen, then narrow. "What're you still doing in here?" he demands, incredulous, with what seems like an inordinate amount of judgment for a boy who's monkeyed himself onto a sentient robotic lion. "It's like three in the morning!" At once his brows tic; his chin tilts up as he counts off some mental figures to the ceiling, but he shrugs. "Or one and a half vargas. Something like that."

Keith rumples back his hair. Exhaust's cloudy in his bones, aching with a swarm of words. "Go to bed, Lance. I'm fine."

"Hate to break it to you," Lance says through the muffling glass. "But you look like the exact opposite of fine, dude. Describing you would take words that'd get us kicked right off a _kids'_ show."

A breath seethes through his teeth. He aches, still, with unseen stars—wonders if Shiro'd felt the cut connection, if time only freezes while he's gone. But there's Lance, in all his starless staring. "What're _you_ doing here?" 

This is the wrong question. Lance glowers, and goes back to climbing. Words jar and echo along the Black Lion's carapace, shrilling without substance. Her doors grind open, and then Lance comes striding through. "Have you just been sleeping in here? Do you not even wash anymore?" He sniffs in a deep theatric whiff; his mouth pinches. "I guess not. If no one else's gonna say it, guess the dirty work's just gonna be on me." He thumbs over a shoulder. "Get out of here, Keith. Go take a bath."

Red would've shaken him off before he'd ever gotten near the doors, once—but the Red Lion's across the hangar, its livid, waiting eyes cut dark. That's not his thought to carry anymore. Keith turns his head. "I don't want to talk right now."

By the seat, Lance plants his hands on his hips and stoops down like a crone, brows skewing and nose wrinkling fit to crease his nostrils. His hair's standing on end, the electric crown of a body pushed beyond sleep for a few days too many. "I'm not kidding about that—Hunk'd have to fry garlic in here for three days just to get you out of the air. Come on, man," he adds, heavier; the gilt's cracking. "Get out of there."

"Just after I—"

"After you what?" His eyes drift over the dim controls, a towel draped over the seat, the helmet rolled into the corner. Struck and slow, Lance says, "Just how much do you stay in here, anyway?"

An echo flexes in every cord of his throat. _I'll lead Voltron. As long as you don't interfere with me, I won't interfere with you._ Allura knows some of it—she must have. She's left him to his own devices, watched with flat, splintered trust from the corners of her eyes. 

But Lance has only ever seen what's ahead.

"Leave it alone, Lance," Keith says, low.

"I know this isn't about the Black Lion," Lance says, "because you're pretty obviously doing fine with it in the field."

Keith stares up without a word to spare.

Lance scrubs both palms against his head, groans up to the ceiling. "I hate that look. Don't make me say this."

"I'm not _making_ you say anything. I told you to go."

He turns away, but Lance's voice shrills through the compact space, every gesture whistling like a storm. "Typical, Keith. We pretty much had to beg you to lead the team, _beg_ you to help us save the universe, and here you are, still moping like we've got the time for that. You're the Black Paladin now! The Black Lion chose you, so now _you_ get to be the head. You're the one everyone listens to. You've got an ancient alien warrior cult on speed-dial just waiting for you to tell them where to fight. Even _Princess Allura_ 's counting on you, and you're in here because you can't even get it together to take a shower. Can you even imagine what Shiro'd say if he could see you?"

"He hasn't said anything!"

The next heartbeat crackles.

"Run that by me again," Lance says.

He's burning, cold from bones to tendons. His grip knuckles over the glowing bulbs of the pilot seat. "I'm not sure yet," Keith says, and lifts his head to meet Lance's frozen stare. "A while ago—Haggar told us that she couldn't see a difference in Zarkon—that there was still a champion of the Galra Empire flying with us. I thought she was talking about me.

"But I'm starting to think—maybe Haggar wasn't wrong. I can feel him sometimes. I don't know who we brought back last time—but it had to have some of Shiro's quintessence. That was how the Black Lion tracked him down. I think the Black Lion's been protecting him—pulling his energy back together into the Shiro we lost."

He's said too much—knows it at once. There's a ring still bright in his ears, an accusation too lately torn open: _you're putting the lives of two people over the lives of everyone else in the entire universe._ He doesn't have proof, or excuses—

But Lance's already swiping a rough look, left and right, as if he might see Shiro shining through the lion's drowsing walls. "That _would_ pretty much explain why it likes you so much," he says, in his rambling meaningless way, and steps forward. "All right, come on. Time to remember your knees, Keith. Up-up-up!"

"What? I just _told_ you—"

"Yeah," Lance says, and even if his voice carries the same nasal, eager note, his eyes are new metal, unflinching. "You told me that you're still talking to the guy who got you into the Garrison, whose orders you've been following since before we got into space. Let me just ask you one thing." He's crowding up into the seat—doesn't even notice where he's going until his knee jars the seat. 

He says, "How many times did you see him out in the desert, Keith?"

Keith snaps back against the seat. Light by light the panels stir, wakening to a threat that has nothing to do with Zarkon. But Lance's voice shrills on, coarse as any alarm. "I _know_ ," pinched sour with compromise, "you're not a total idiot under that mullet. So there's gotta be some part of you that's still _sane_. Think about it. When you're talking to him, does he say anything you don't already know? Anything _any of us_ wouldn't want to hear?"

"Spit it _out_."

"Oh, what, so that you can make me the bad guy again? The lions're just _lions_ , Keith. The only stuff that's in there is the stuff that's coming out of your own head. Maybe something that _looks_ like Shiro's in there, but only because—"

The Black Lion stretches beneath him, fit to scrape Lance bare. She recognizes another lion's territory, but not to this extent, a trespass fit to light fireworks between his ribs. "I'm not in the mood," Keith says. 

He pushes up, and there's a weightless, jumbled instant where Lance doesn't quite fall back for him, where ankles and knees nearly tangle before Lance goes reeling. His legs jolt along the consoles—his palms nearly slam the keys before he hauls himself upright, barrels forward and seizes Keith's arm.

"You know what?" he bites out, all looming demand. "I don't care what you want, Keith! Face it, if you thought there was anything _left_ of Shiro worth getting out of there, you'd have told everyone weeks ago. You don't know if he's real because _you don't care_. It's just like it was before he disappeared—"

Real fury, Keith thinks, with an absent sort of interest—the kind of showy force that Lance's always skirted from using before. Lance depends on charisma, even when he doesn't have any; he plays things to get people to like him, to _want_ him.

He says, "What I'm doing isn't going to get anyone _hurt_ this time."

"Oh, _like it's not going to hurt you_."

Silence. The air tears, piece by piece, to one boy's shallow, tempered panting.

"You just want someone to tell you that it's going to be okay," Lance says, working every word out of his throat in splinters. "Well, it's not. You're the guy we're stuck with. Keith—this is a giant messed-up war that only _we_ can take care of." His voice rises, flaring shrapnel as Keith turns his head. "You can't just burn up your whole life sleeping just to hold onto something that isn't even real!"

The quiet settles for one slow beat.

It sounds like the kind of speech that Lance's been holding onto—something he's nursed in corners, flashed in the little bouts of temper that he'd shown on the bridge or in hallways with his head bowed against any real conflict. Lance does that—copes with misery by acting out into greater displays that'll win him praise enough to get by, taking victory like anesthetic.

But Keith's made his choice.

He twists away; his elbow snaps out of Lance's grip and he feels the echoes of Lance's fingers go stuttering through empty air, too late. 

"Watch me," Keith says.  


# *

  
In every visit, the witch is kneeling.

Against the cell's white she stands stark as an inkblot on paper: hands clasped, her eyelids locked over her lantern eyes. Vulnerability comes to sleepers—but not Haggar: her flesh is plasticine, her tattoos gaunt as scars, creviced and valleyed behind the lurid hum of the electric bars. She hardly looks alive. Do all witches look so, Allura wonders—as if no pulse could have ever stirred those dead veins, like the dolls that they'd strung up for festival nights on Lirend—

"You've brought loud thoughts with you today."

Reflex hauls her back a step; at once, Allura steels herself against the felt burst of fury for it. A princess would know her own dignity. "Did I _disturb_ you?"

"Ah," the witch says, even and answerless. "Have you decided on your name?"

Privacy's made Haggar no more sensical, and no more inclined to move; she holds her place as Allura faces her, unflinching. "We both have a greater war to think of. Perhaps you should consider trying to master empathy instead of projection. You clearly have the time for it."

"Another order?" Haggar drawls. "Or should I fear interrogation after all?"

 _No weakness before a faithful Galra_ —and yet her fists stiffen at her sides. "It's been a number of quintants since we fought. Yet you haven't made any complaints of injury. I wondered," Allura says, measuring every syllable. "if you might need assistance into a healing pod."

Gold crackles over her empty eyes—but Haggar laughs in a silvery coil. "Generosity indeed, princess. Not only will you return me to Zarkon, you'll restore me to the best of health when you do."

 _Zarkon—_ never _emperor_ , never _his highness_ , and certainly never gone. A wonder or a symptom, that Haggar never speaks of him as something past. He is her fixed point.

"I managed to speak with Lotor," Allura says. "He hardly seems interested in taking you back. It isn't a matter of what we'll restore to him—it never has been."

"Such wisdom," Haggar murmurs. "Perhaps we need a lesson instead. Do you think of me as a person, child?"

Their last lesson had gashed the hangar, torn clumps from the wrought walls. But Haggar hardly seems inclined to rise today. Still, Allura bows her head; there's no ground to concede to a witch. "Are you?"

"That depends on your framework. You're Alfor's daughter, after all—the very distillation of all the traditions he sought to uphold, with all of its dark roots stripped dry. The Alteans tied personhood to the body. The body is alive or dead. A person or a ceremonial object. No being can endure two opposite roles at the same time." 

"What has that to do with you?"

"Altea," Haggar says, "loathed the practice of ransoming. Personhood cannot be bought and sold. A ceremonial object will never understand your negotiations."

"What has that to do with _keeping you well?_ "

"You've made your choice as to what you think of me. You don't intend to be kind," Haggar says, and her eyes burn gold. "You only seek to weave the kind of noose that will keep your self-righteousness intact when I choke at your whim."

"No!"

The shout jolts and rings between them.

Allura breathes.

"Whatever might have passed between Zarkon and my father," she says,. "or my father and you—he would have _never_ executed you, tortured you, whatever monstrosities you're feeding in the dark of your skull. He taught me to be only what he was, and if I live, it is _in his image_!"

But outrage withers; the silence draws from its deep roots and blooms again. In her cell, Haggar looks at her as the dullest animal might, without hope or meaning.

"I am not fair," Allura says. "I am not trustworthy as my father was. But the paladins have trusted me to guide them, and I _will_ do whatever I must to be worthy."

Haggar stretches out her fingers in a starry flex; she rises to her knees, shuffles towards the bars. Her shadow shivers where it splays against the humming lights—but not a photon can reach beyond the bars except what their settings allow. "Shall we see the proof?"

Allura studies her, ghost-eyed. Haggar smiles. "You say that you distrust the information I can offer, but your new Black Paladin has long understood. My keep is only worth the prices that I can pay for you. If you won't take my lessons, what uses have I left?"

She knows the damage that a witch can wreak; her hangar will carry their scars until the war's end. Still Haggar waits, her fingers grey as stone, waiting as if in some trust. As if pulled by her shadow, Allura reaches through the bars—

> _-and feels herself awake: scrawny-legged and warm, the cleverest pupil in her tutor's charge at nine deca-phoebs of age._
> 
> _Today she's angry—she's picked and filched her way into this part of the castle in a fit of pique. The king had spoken out of turn to her, something sharp enough to fire her temper, his mouth seamed with patience and tact, patent betrayal of all the understandings between them. Off she'd scrambled while he'd tugged his brocaded collar, sighed fit to cloud the hall behind her. Still her ears ring with it: the resounding, righteous steps which supplanted a heartbeat. Six levels down, she'd gone: past levels of barracks and kitchens, the silvery experimental biospheres still reeking of ammonia and soured chromium. In the elevator compartment she'd clambered onto the railings, hooked her ankles over the lightbars, and swung there, a frilly chandelier as it shot down, down, down the cables. In a static, winterlit hall, she'd crouched behind pillars, softening her pigeon-toed hops down the glassy tiles. This far down, the oxygen machines warred with the silence of naked, deathless steel: electricity burned steady._
> 
> _Every breath burned, fit to char and tar lungs to pulp._
> 
> _With watchful eyes and nimble swipes, she'd tweaked the guards, one by one, until their visors shivered out and they fell. She hopped and stretched her legs until she could teeter just high enough to shut off each secret switch to the mechanical sensors. Alone and victorious she'd burst into the nightmare room: the stripped level at the bottom of their rootless castle, where there wandered only visored guards and the castle's dregs._
> 
> _Her holos had tutored her before she'd sunk down through the castle—quavering voices whispered of torture racks, of waterwheels fit to break any spine, of poisons and open space burials. A mere five hundred years ago, the room had been the width of five strides from end to end. Her ancestors had opened three little spouts from the ceiling between the bouqueted lights: these were zinc-coated_
> 
> _Into the ghost's room she'd stepped, a bird settling on an altar. But the hall lay empty: fifty alcoves stretching bare as eyelids, one after another._
> 
> _Something creaked, a distant rattle. A shadow rose behind her._
> 
> __Even courage does not change the nature of state documents, my Allura, _her father'd remarked when fresh, striding guards brought her back to him, a royal clump of scowls and skirts and knotted limbs._ Look forward to your old age, when you'll see them for something a little more useful than coloring books. __
> 
> __How did you catch me? _Allura demanded._ You shouldn't have! __
> 
> _His eyes creased, a furling paper smile._ Perhaps you were fed false intelligence, _Alfor said, grave-mouthed._ Those, too, are the dangers of sovereignhood. __
> 
> _But he'd caught her in his arms. Her hand in his, they'd walked back down through the castle's levels. In the prisoner's hall, the king pressed his palm over her starry palm to each button until she'd seen the crackling light-shields, the infrared motion sensors, the carbon monoxide detectors, and each keypad._ I want you to know what you keep in the name of Altea, _he'd murmured._ But I do it knowing that you'll be a greater sovereign than I'll ever be. You'll have no need for these. __
> 
> __Won't I? _she'd said, challenging, and looked at him with the eye of a girl who'd been dangled before the royal guard and taunted about her sources for state secrets._
> 
> _Alfor only laughed._ Any beast turns lethal when leashed for long enough, and war's a more dangerous beast than most. Altea eliminates its enemies or it finds common ground with them. It's a matter of common sense. __
> 
> _He'd tossed her into the air and she'd laughed in the end, burrowing into the circle of her father's lean arms. Even after she'd cradled the memory beneath her ribs, the lesson—for with her father, there was always a lesson._
> 
> _A prison is—_

—nails stinging palms, salt painting red at the back of her teeth. 

Her head jolts to Haggar's gold stare. Memory pours on the lacquer and wears thin where it shouldn't, the gloss worn off every sweet and ugly detail, and in their wake she's shaking. "Did you _enjoy_ that?" Allura bites out.

But Haggar's drawn back to the farthest hollow of her cell; she hunches against the wall like a cringing beast. "Alfor was always shortsighted. He was the youngest of us and it weakened him—he could afford to be _merciful_ and _ignorant_ , because there were always others ready to stain their hands on his behalf. Never mind the engineers who drew up the designs for his vague sketches, the smiths who forged the comet's material into each lion's casing, the diplomats who negotiated the trades that would bring about his engines. He _drew up_ the plans—oh, the sacrifices he made. So it went, all his life. Even when Voltron grew in might under Zarkon's directions, Alfor selected the missions; he chose to save whomever he wanted, and the rest of the paladins paid his price time and again."

It carries a bitterness that she can't register, can't trust. "My father _trusted_ you."

"As I said. He believed that it was enough to carry a weapon without ever using it. Didn't he?"

Her eyes hang gold with all that she' s seen. Allura chokes on it—wants her to choke, too. It's a reframing of all that she's known. Her fists wring tight. The world goes savaging; light boils through her hands into an aching light overhead. "Is that your idea of trust? Rifling through my mind, stealing my—"

"Yes," Haggar says, distant and purring. "Just like that. A witch's power isn't tied to anger, but anger makes for an easy summons at first. Will you take the vengeance that your father never could?"

"It's about time that I took a few _answers_ , for a start."

Haggar's smile knifes wide. "How volatile," she says. "I wonder what you saw that so disturbed you."

"What?"

Haggar presses her bound wrists together; her fingers, flexing apart, burn with empty color—shades of the memory, but nothing distinct. "It was as I promised: a lesson, not an attack. I drew an old poison to the surface and left it there to lie.You spoke as it ran—should you survive, you will learn better. Such skills are useful for seeing clearly. "

"Is this your idea of a fair trade?" Allura demands, incredulous. " _Poisoning_ me?"

"You have power, child, even if you won't recognise it. You've kept me imprisoned for some time; even as you gave me your hand, you drew up all your shields against me. It took so little for me to seed your mind with it," Haggar says, soft. "Now imagine what you could do to a battlefield of minds left unaware."

The memory flares fit to choke: a riverbed of spaceships hanging in empty space, every soldier snared and waiting for the blow of a lion's fury.

Her fists knot against her knees. "You were never so strong—"

"No. It's a temperamental power. I intended for it to project your greatest doubt."

"It—" The word twists in her throat. "I told you, I remembered my _father_."

A slow breath strings the air. "Oh," Haggar says. "And?"

As if she could cut apart her own heart and scratch inside for some trace of poison—but she remembers then. Skull to phalanges, with every vein and artery and fiber of her, Allura had loathed the castle. 

_Prison is a warmaker._

Gone, now. Her father gone, and with it the feeling, too. It's only a castle; she has a prisoner of her own.

"So you see," Haggar says, and her eyes are clear. "I am an object, and you are not keeping me out of your own kindness. One way or another, you'll steal my secrets. If you're willing to learn them, I'll offer you my lessons out of my own free will. But witchery requires a certain amount of honesty with yourself. You stood against me twice—but that was in battle. Even an animal knows how to war. Ask yourself: are you better or worse than a beast?"  


# *

  
It takes a few weeks before Pidge unearths the coordinates for their first planet from some tangle of intercepted imperial correspondence. The flight's quiet: a single wormhole jump, and a day's flight which skirts the few Galra patrols of the sector without fanfare. They swing into orbit around a system long-subdued, circling through a few uncertain reels. A few satellites come perking after them, but those are merest automated actions. No scouts drive out to pinpoint their locations; nothing greets them at all.

Nhafi looks remarkably well-kept for a system battered past rebellion.

Hunk, shoulders blocky with solid thoughts over the navigational console, scratches his head. "So now we—give out the announcement, I guess?" he says. "We gotta call up their king, right?" His round eyes spin over to a Blade of Marmora, where it's chosen to loom by the wall. "Do they have a king?"

"That’s irrelevant," Allura says, before any answer comes. The Blade's mask does not turn beneath her interruption; with Keith's tension thrumming through the castle, they've made their ultimate allegiances clear. She has her own authority to keep. "Make the landing protocols, Hunk."

Pidge peers at her from beneath her heavy fringe as Hunk hurls himself into the sequences, watching point after calculated point bloom across their shared screens. "You sure this’ll work?"

The planet saturates the bridge windows, a seismic stretch of color: gold and red, its few thin seas drained to dust. "If Haggar accomplished it," Allura says, with her father's steel, "then so will I."

The castle thunders down into sand. 

They plunge into the teeth of a bristling day. A storm's barely whipping along the horizon, stinging clouds and gnashing dust through the flushed dawn.Every breath wanes too quick, and every blink stings. Here and there, the worn, splintered-bone stumps of trees grit through the sand in a last defiant flash. Dunes stretch longer than the eye's willing to drift, dust spinning into impossible colors, the wild tides of a world consumed.

On the first step, Lance scrubs out his hair and mutters into his helmet before he cuts off his own feed. Close on Allura's heels, Keith folds his arms, waiting.

Allura takes the lead. She picks her way through, leaves the sand barely shifted beneath her driftwood steps. Together, they walk until she comes to a clearing ringed with reedy, cracking trees. There, Allura drops to her knees, her gown blossoming pale over the drained earth as her fingers fan over its dust.

She closes her eyes.

Beneath her lies a dreaming force, a shapeless strength like the one which had beat at the heart of the Balmera, but drowsier, deeper, nameless. A witch's strength comes no more naturally to her than alchemy would—but there's a sense to it, a clean certainty like fighting instinct. She bows her head, hair flowing in the dry breeze like new mist; word by word, she shapes the barren silence. Faces seem to sift through her hands as she whispers, or things which might have once worn faces, a pattern on the cusp of understanding. Grain after grain spills over into stars, and Allura swallows, dry, against the certainty of it—that if she looks skyward—

A sweep of power thrills over her, racing through the earth to light the faraway dunes, one by one. For an instant they glow in chorus: united in the sense of something waking.

Then the dunes wink out.

The paladins shift on their heels. She hears Hunk's stooping, the snag of his frown. "Uh," he says, and looks around for confirmation. "Guys?"

She knows better than to try again. With trembling fingers, Allura levers herself up from the earth. Her eyes swing from horizon to horizon; the thinly-stenciled trees are withering around her. Too quick, she rises—and stops again, swaying with her own force but nothing else. Neither power nor color comes pouring out of the dunes. Only the winds roar. 

"I don't," she says—but it takes two tries to say it. They must hear her. "I don't understand."

Pidge's already scrabbling instructions into her wrist's holoscreen, wringing new chirps with every tap. "The redshift sensors were picking up a lot of power over here just a couple seconds ago—but it's all gone. How's that possible?"

"You think it's hiding?"

"That's—not how quintessence works. This place should be _full_ of life—even if Zarkon managed to cage it up, someone who knew how to work with it should be able to _feel_ it in the planet somehow. Everything we've seen's just been dying, so if Allura didn't feel it—"

"Allura," Lance says, too sharp as the world blurs. "Hey. We've got you!"

In strides, he's at her side—catches her in an incongruously perfect sweep, his arms looping her waist. They stare at each other, and for once he looks as bewildered as she does, stripped of anything but bewilderment.

"Lotor must've showed up before we did," Keith says. He's already turning back. "Pidge—send a signal back to the castle. See what they can find. We should probably get moving."

"Boy, you're just _really_ drawing a lot of conclusions!" Lance snaps, a burst of temper that showers like shrapnel. Allura winces as his hold tenses. "You wanna try living in _this_ moment for a sec, mullethead?"

"If Allura says that she can do something, she can do it," Keith says, empty and sharp. His jaw's drawn, his shoulders brittle as old glass. "But she didn't. The only explanation that makes sense's that something got in her way. Either it's Lotor or it's someone else. Either way, they've got a head-start on us. We don't have time to stand around talking about it out here."

Lance slings him a dark-eyed look before he twists away. He might have argued once—but something's shifted between them: he's learned better than to think that Keith's worth the breath.

Lifting his head from Pidge's shoulder, Hunk clears his throat, a rusted brassy note. "Uh, well, it looks like the next-best place's called Elruths? That's gonna be another wormhole jump away. I gotta say, though," he says as Allura bows her head, unraveling herself from Lance's cautious hold with a murmur. "There's something weird about this setup. I can feel it in my gut."

Demoted from support again, Lance nudges up next to him. His mouth purses and works through a string of uncertain shapes. "Eh," he says in the end, and elbows Hunk's ribs to compensate, ignoring the yelp. "Let's worry about your gut once we're on the road, bud." 

"Literally," says Pidge, but there's none of her usual bite.

"Yeah, that's fair," Lance says. "Hunk, my dude, if you need a barf bag, I think it's only fair that we all get like a ten-second forecast warning, you know?"

"Aw, come _on_ , guys, that was way, way back! I haven't yarfed on anything in—at least some months! Plus, y'know, Yellow'd never forgive me if I started doing that. Can we please just leave it back in the past?"

"Well, what happens at the Garrison doesn't stay at the Garrison, _I'm_ just saying—"

Together they totter across the terrain towards the castle. Hunk trails last, still dabbing at his own keyboard as Pidge marches off to plug into her station. "Seriously, though," he grumbles into his screen, "it just doesn't make sense—those readings were off the _charts_ until we were right on top of the place—"

"Get moving, Hunk," she hears Keith say from the threshold. At once, Hunk scurries up and across the landing; Keith _kicks_ the door shut behind them as the castle engines thrum and wake.

Below, unseen: a single daisy prickles out of the earth; it sways in the breeze as the smoke billows across the clearing.  


# *

  
Lesson: The only true resurrection is memory. The greatest comfort of nostalgia is that the dead do not come back.

Love has nothing to do with it. Only a child would dream otherwise.  


# *

  
Elruths turns up dry, as does Plumeck. With her witchery run empty, Allura falls back on diplomacy. She sends every emissary and allied diplomat at her disposal to the systems for reports, further information; she runs intergalactic calls late into the night, begging for the permissions to land and to evacuate.

Name after name tides back to them. The castle settles on three planets, parts its gates to grey-stripped plains whose citizens have long been long torn off the territory. Time and again, Allura kneels in earth boiled dry, roots her fingers in their dust for hours on end. The result never changes: she surfaces to nothing. They're desert planets, stripped down to grit and topsoil; Galra forces cored the hearts out of them long ago.

Still, such visits bring their own little victories. The castle takes in refugees. Hunk and Lance shepherd raggedy crowds up through its ghostly corridors. Pidge, digging through the archives, cracks the codes to unearth long-locked barracks. Galra fleets abandon their halfhearted chases, and the lions of Voltron fly out separately to handle Lotor as he maps out his father's old routes with furious devotion. Allura starts staying up late to stay over the controls, sending out communications to the planets before they reach them. Even Coran's retired, exhausted as the castle's menagerie expands: Slav and refugees clustering, demanding to be fed and trained and made useful.

Keith learns to watch.

He finds her at the console, talking to a six-eyed advisor on Rengulus, a planet long burned out to obsidian islets. Not a stutter breaks her voice as he comes into view; she carries on, raising the sharp, belling notes of a girl born to leverage diplmats. The advisor clatters back in some dialect of clicks and hisses; he sounds vaguely approving, despite the static. 

The transmission shuts off. Straight-spined, Allura drags the heel of a hand against the console. In the quiet, her shoulders slope; her head drops for an instant as she turns, and—

" _Watch_ it!"

A heartbeat, and Keith's got her by the elbow. But there's no tremor in her frame, and Allura stares at his glove banded black over her sleeve. 

Stillness overruns her before she lifts her chin. "I'm perfectly fine, Keith," Allura says. Conscious, too late, he lets go. 

They've talked in passing here and there, but they haven't been alone together since the prison cell. The imprint of his fingers burns through the cloth. Her fingers twitch to chafe back the strangeness of the touch. He's still staring.

"Did he know anything?" Keith says.

 _He,_ as if an elder of such force, seniority, and military advantages can be so distilled. Diplomacy's taken its own kind of toll: Allura's started to cling to titles. In her spare time, she drifts between meals and the navigational console, muttering military and inherited titles of foreign planets under her breath. 

"The Antiquated Chancellor of Rengulus," Allura says aloud, but without force. A restless hand sweeps up her looseblown hair, winding it against her nape and groping for pins which are nowhere to be found. Not to be undone by her own impulse, she anchors her coiled hair at her nape, and turns back. "He claims that he understands no more of the situation than we do. The planet has only recently started to run arid, but no Galra ships have been sighted within the system. We must be missing some link. Elruths and Plumeck were well-known to be Zarkon's haunts. Certainly we've cleared enough of his cargoships from the area for it to be convincing. Yet if there had been power, it should have been in each planet when we arrived."

"And you still don't think Lotor found some way to harvest quintessence from a distance."

"If he had," Allura says, clear as ice. "do you imagine we'd be merely chatting? He remains behind—it is our duty to keep him there."

"I was _asking_."

But he's always asking, innocent and brutal to his own ignorant advantage, the boy paladin that they'd crowned to lead them, with hardly a thought to spare for whether he could manage it. "And what," Allura says. would you do with the information, if you had it?"

"You're not one of the Galra," Keith says, dark-eyed and slow. "You need to remember that."

The words prickle down her back. Haggar's wrists, her quiet voice in recital. _A person or a ceremonial object_. But which has a princess ever been?

Aloud, she says, "It's been a long day, Keith. If you intend to make a point, I'd rather that you make it quickly."

Behind her, breaths sift through his teeth, one after another, puffing like steam. He seems to be struggling for tact. "Everyone's doing what they can," Keith grits in the end, his voice parched of anything like sympathy. "But we're not going to get too far if you're hiding something from us."

When they'd come to her, she'd imagined Voltron as something quite different—allies, creatures who would understand, friends as they had been in her father's days. But Lance chases glory; Pidge roots herself in wires; Hunk has too much heart, and every eye looks to Keith in the end for the orders that Shiro can no longer dispense. Her warleader, at war with a universe too small to contain his grief.

She commands the Blue Lion; she carries the crown—and still she's never ruled them.

"If I'm keeping secrets," Allura says at last. "I doubt I'm the only one."

Abruptly, she wheels away."At this stage, Rengulus's report merely confirms what we need to know," Allura says. "Lotor hasn't resumed Zarkon's operations. And we must go forward. Do you have any objections?"

She doesn't wait for his answer. The silence holds, even as the door closes behind her.  


# *

  
It shouldn't be as much of a surprise as it is when Lotor catches up.

Their wormhole opens over Algagri to find five others, wired and waiting. Portals fire up across the grid, lights bared like teeth. The first ships have already started drifting through, fat-bellied and painted in the lush, malicious violet of the Galra feet, lasers working in lazy, wheeling turns at the base. Line by line, Galra forces are massing into a shifting flight of regiments and formations. The biggest ships hang over the planet like hooks.

" _Guys_ ," Hunk pants, and then the first row opens fire.

The lions disperse, each firing in a new direction to split the field with their roar. At once a wave of dogfighter-narrow wings washes between them. Through the haze, Keith sees a circle closing around the Red and Blue Lions.

 _A trap_.

The next screen's flashing up even as he reaches for the control. "Pidge!" Keith bites out through a guttering hail. He _dodges_ and the Green Lion's cockpit springs onto his screen. He's already sweeping the field with a glare—but a three-row circle's not impossible to break with all lions in the field. 

_You could run this simulation in your sleep,_ memory says in a voice not his own, warm as a real touch, gleaming silver.

His head bows; his shoulders hunch. "All right. Hang in there— _Pidge_ , use the stealth shield and get them to break formation. That one looks pretty complicated—so the sooner we get them out of it, the more they'll be focused on trying to figure out where to fly instead of hitting us. Lance, you have to hold them off while Blue gets to a better vantagepoint."

"On it!"

The Green Lion goes sailing first, dissolving into the black; through the seething, malevolent lights, the Red Lion roars, flashing bright as a new sun.

 _He's losing his hesitation,_ Shiro says. He's braced a silvery hand across the headrest; his a pproval burns like daylight through the outpouring of data feeds. _Always knew he had it in him._

Lance had said: _He's only there because you wish he was._

His grip tightens. "Allura," Keith says, "there's going to be a couple fulcrumships. Those're the ones that tell the rest where to fly in a formation. You have to take those out. Coordinate with Lance—make sure he can see your plotted movements on his screen. It'll make it easier to shoot." He sweeps the hair from his eyes. There's too many screens to watch. "Hunk, hold off the next round—I'll round these up and get them away. Shiro—"

 _Shiro_. Silence pulses through every speaker.

"Keith," Allura says, gutting and metallic. Beneath her voice he hears the Blue Lion thrumming like a current. "You must focus."

He grits his teeth. "I _am_."

The maneuver works. Together, the lions tear through the fleet. A large cruiser sweeps in behind Hunk, dropping into sight at the last instant. Pidge's scream shrills through every intercom, a wild ululation; out of empty air, the Green Lion springs back to being to shatter it in a burst of fire.

But the portals are gaping open still; more ships come pouring through the empty, warping circles. Red-lit, Lance snarls fit to strip paint off a ship. "There's more coming through again! We're not making a dent! Where're those things even getting the power to keep—"

" _Wait_ ," Allura bites it out, hard and wondering. "I recognise this—there's a reason that they're flying in such formations. Keith, Hunk—we're going to lure the bulk of the fleet in your direction."

"What're you—"

"They've brought charging ships with them to feed the portals by way of specific formation commands. The only chance we have to close the portals is by removing those ships! The Black Lion and the Yellow Lion must hold them at bay while we seek out the sources of their power. If you can't manage it, we'll never be able to last."

The diagram jitters before his eyes, running on instinct, not numbers. _Must_ , she'd said, but behind the new ranks, glittering ships are swarming in, a livid tide of fighters ready to die for their singular cause. If she's wrong, then there's no surrender and no end, no victory to be dragged from this endless tide of ships staffed with mechanical soldiers.

_Listen to me._

Shiro's fingers clasp against his temples—Shiro's head bows over his in the chair. His eyes are stars. The world filters into silver lines over a white page. 

"Shiro," he breathes, the name warm as daylight in his lungs. "What're you doing? How're you—"

_Allura's right. We don't have that much time. You can do this—just hold on._

A ghost's translucent hands slide over his. 

Under their fingers, every control flares. The Black Lion _roars_ , fit to jolt the shrapnel in the spinning asteroid wings. He feels the rest more than he sees it: the wings which split from her haunches, crackling alive through silent space. A gearshift's _pull_ , and Lotor's fleet is shriveling in every window as the Black Lion warps through the thick of them, her forcefield charring away new ships by the fistful. 

Shiro's breath scoffs through his teeth, and Keith laughs up at him in a burst of shock—-

Time stops.

The featherfaint pressure shivers against his knuckles, evaporates. Shiro's bright eyes fizzling beneath the star's glare. At once, Keith twists, reaching out, fumbling at thin air—but the Black Lion's already moving. Light clatters between its great wings, snarling as it's forged into a clean point. Half a screen away, ship after Galra warship is struggling and swaying, whole reams clinging to their assigned positions—but to no avail. Only the lions keep their place, watching as some invisible distortion yawns open in space.

One second, two. 

The brightness between the Black Lion's wings _slams_ through it, a livid blade savaging through a black heart. All down the battlefield's emptied stretch, they feel the shiver: every particle atomised within the field before the hole snaps shut.

An instant, and sound comes rushing back. Voices pour through the intercom in a torrent. "Keith!" Pidge's shouting over Lance's mad, bewildered sputtering. "What was that? That was definitely you, right?"

In a static-split corner of the screen, Hunk's already torn off his helmet, pumping both fists in Yellow's sunlit corner. "All right, my man! We got them! Maybe we won't die light-years away from Earth in a crazy firestorm with no one to send our bodies back to our families!"

Allura's speaking too, crisp belling notes—but the world's paling, flashing in the cockpit. Light shivers, and then Shiro's fingers are digging against his knuckles, harder and warmer than any trick of daylight. His eyes are constellations; the set of his mouth sweetens on a sigh as he leans in, leans close.

Forehead touches forehead. Keith breathes him in. "Shiro," he says.

The world spins white.  


# *

  
_Shiro_.

It's minutes after, or hours or days. The cockpit's gone and the world's all stars. They're falling—they're _falling_.

Reflex more than real thought moves him: Keith dreams a sketch-grey patch of earth, and together they go tumbling into its hasty dust. They: Shiro, twisting beneath him, hard planes and warm and real for once. Pillowed against a dune, light threads his dark hair into filigree, strikes a glint out of his warm, curving mouth. He's grinning, delirious—the pilot's grin, seconds out of freefall. 

"Well," he says, gasping and laughing, backlit by the Black Lion's ghostly sunrise, "looks like it worked."

Keith barrels against him, breathes in the dust and steel of him, the engine reek that carries nothing human in its dust, heart pounding into the empty matrix of his stardust body. Shiro clasps the nape of his neck with a steel palm and he doesn't flinch. "What _was_ that? How did you get out there? What _happened_?"

Shiro smiles at him, wide and helpless: joy shocked raw, the kind of sheer, brilliant look that he'd once slung over a motorbike's handles, over the end of an extra credit equation in physics, same as he'd looked at the Garrison, a layer of sunlight beneath the gilding. "A win," he says. "That's all that matters."

Elsewhere: there's a war, a battle whose remnants are still meandering back into the castle hangar—but here the fight's long and gladly lost. "I don't think that's how it works," Keith says.

It's the wrong answer. Joy unravels as gravity settles back onto their shoulders. "Keith," Shiro says, and it aches, a voice laid soft and loose, just the way he remembers, the way he hasn't heard it since they'd broken Zarkon for the first time. "That last attack bought us some time, but not much. Listen to me—I think it's the first time the Black Lion's really let us in. This could be it."

"What—" but he has to work to spin the words. "What does that mean?"

Shiro's eyes fix on him, studying. "Can you stand right now?" he says. "I didn't mean to pull you in. Just—for a second, I thought—"

"You thought that you weren't going to make it out," Keith says, and _knows_ now, he's sure. In a thousand years, he couldn't have pulled off that move on his own. "That was real, wasn't it? You were there with me." The words ring, rough and too sharp. "Just for a second, I thought I felt you—fade."

Shiro straightens, sitting back. In an instant Keith's pushing himself up, clasping at Shiro's hands—but his fingers slip through like a knife through water.

His shoulders set; his hands drag along the earth. He keeps still, rooted in shock, as Shiro bows his head to tip their foreheads together, suspended just short for a touch that won't take. "I'm sorry," Shiro says.

None of this makes sense. "Why?"

"I took a risk. Sometimes you have to take a chance when you see it."

"You knew," Keith says. "You knew—that using this attack was going to do something to you."

"Not exactly," Shiro says. "I knew that we had to win that battle. And I was right—you got us through it." His mouth crooks. "You might even be flying the Black Lion better than I ever did."

A snarl lashes in the hollow of his throat; he swallows down its sting. "Like you can't break my record," Keith says, and a breath fit to ring between them, rough as any command. "It wouldn't be the first time."

Inhale, exhale—and Shiro pulls away.

" _Shiro_ ," he says, but Shiro's already risen to his feet. He's a lightning vision against the dreamscape, all fading static and cloudy eyes. A wisp that could be blown to dust by the faintest stray breath.

"You felt its power, Keith," he says, low as scorch. "There's still more that I haven't shown you—the Black Lion has abilities we've never even dreamed of. For some reason, the lions hold back on their pilots. It takes time to unlock their knowledge, earn their trust. Remember—Alfor and Zarkon spent years tuning the lions to their exact needs, discovering their limits. But you won't need that kind of time if I'm in here."

"How?"

Shiro lifts his head. "This place," he says. "The desert—it's your memory. When you're not around, the Black Lion doesn't have any reason to keep its shields up. Everything in the space just becomes part of its memory. I've already picked up more than I should have just by watching. We have to take this chance. A few more weapons like that, and we might not even need to form Voltron to get through these battles."

"You barely got out _this_ time."

"That's not the point."

"Not the _point_?"

"Imagine if we could send each of the lions to different quadrants. We could take back entire galaxies simultaneously. This could break the empire for good."

But he's already striding forward as Shiro talks. A hand swipes at Shiro's jacket, but its lines unravel around his touch, silver urnaveling into a haze. Shiro stares down, glass-eyed; with some care, he presses the very tips of his fingers to Keith's knuckles, a touch just short of imagined.

His dream, his memory. At the backs of his teeth hangs the old scent: cotton and soap and steel, some faint, unnameable thing that always hangs in his throat like summer. "This isn't how it works," Keith says, sharp and rising. "You—you were the reason we even _found_ the lions, Shiro. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here. None of us would."

"For a good cause, Keith."

His shoulders set; his fingers twitch for a bayard long gone, and no matter how he swallows, nothing drowns the desperation which snarls and tangles his empty voice. But he can't be reckless now. He has to get this right. "Right from the beginning, Coran called us the _defenders of the universe._ What did you think _universe_ meant?"

"Something that's bigger than both of us."

"Not bigger than _you_ ," Keith snarls. "Not to me."

"You can't think like that," but Shiro's turning away, fists wringing against some intangible chain. "There's more at risk—if I could just _show_ it to you."

He's been thinking of Shiro in pieces more than a whole: his careful stride and steady eyes, how he's always stood to Keith's right to press human fingertips into his shoulder. But this is a war, still: need's no excuse on its own.

"Fine," Keith says, and Shiro's head snaps up. " Show me."

The space reels between them, uncertain as a moon tumbling out of orbit. In the end, it's a simple thing: Shiro holds out his hand, and Keith seizes it.

Nothing comes at first, and then it does. The desert ebbs away as if on some neatening tide, silver washed out to blindness. Space twists around them, dimensions clenching with new forms, and—

_On a planet spinning blue-yellow-blue, there's a continent which has massed into the shape of a dog. Their single populated continent stretches gritty and flat as a desert flayed to earth, washed dry by centuries of acid rain. The inhabitants find flesh distasteful, and so stitch and cram themselves into perfect spheres after birth, modifying their steel carapaces as they grow like hermits._

_Stars away, there's a planet where flowers grow big as shelters, where a species newly grown to thought huddles in petals as they wait out the rain, wondering at their faces in the softened, mirroring earth._

_There's a planet whose strange, tearful rains have scarred some silken film over its vast crags; year by year, the rains stab in needles at this charred-glue skin; the film wears thin and, shattering, spatters a year's worth of pulp and serum into the violet-bare terrestrial strata, seeping through into mud and mossy residue, hungry as split cells with edges gaping like teeth._

_World after world with their dimensions locked into time crystals, bound by quantum entanglement inside an infinite being of non-equilibrium matter. What's a mere subatomic trick to that? A wink in dislocated space-time; a flash of dimensional fang, and there's your black hole, a particle destabilisation of that which has a tendency to disappear._

_There is – there is – there is -_

Hands lock onto his shoulders, steel and bone—and it's Shiro, dark-eyed and sure, solid in a way that he hasn't been since the battle with Zarkon, and Keith's clinging to him now as the emptiness snarls, scraping along his shoulders, his chest, digging fingers into his wrists as he lifts his head.

 _Please,_ he says in a space without sound, and doesn't know _for what_ , only that he's begging, that he must.

Light lashes space; Shiro's grip tightens, and then he's gasping with a felt-new rush of air, pitching headlong through a dimension without end as the stars go wheeling by in mute galactic spirals, pinpricked bleeding lights. The Black Lion roars, and sound cracks the endless sky. He has a voice now—he's speaking, _shouting_ as they fall together, head over heels, with Shiro's fingers biting into each shoulder, shaping warning after warning as each gets torn from his tongue and teeth by their gasping fall. Their mouths tilt close, close enough to shudder with the shape of his next word, the puff of his breath, and—

_"Keith? Keith, are you in there? Keith, come in!"_

In the cockpit, he sits up to every panel glowering like an eye.

" _Shiro_ ," he says, but the air's stable now, hanging still as cooled metal. He rattles one control, then the next, and then movement bursts into a torrent: slamming button after screen, rocking the cockpit as he lunges and pulls every control with a name churning raw in his throat. Outside, in the bright hangar, his friends are shouting—but the console only darkens as the Black Lion holds its silence against him.  


# *

  
Lesson: we are what we choose to carry with us. Our memories, our loyalties, our genetic natures—these are self-seeded habits which devour their own roots. We take our chains and lash the shackles around our throats.

That is the face of freedom.  


# *

  
This time, at least, Haggar's changed direction.

Alone again, Allura she descends to the cells—finds the witch in the same pose as always: head bowed, hands folded over her knees like a supplicant. It's a pose she knows, but not among the Galra. 

"Are you here to seek comfort?"

Caught, Allura's skirts rustle: a princess's full regalia. They're beginning to run out of planets to search, and they'll need to hurry now that Lotor's begun to lay his traps after all. She has a few names to try, some allies whose reports msut be taken—and still, here she stands, pinching chiffon before the witch's shining cell. "I'd believed that witches were capable of anything. Yet you seem to have lost your capacity for directness."

"Have I."

The witch lifts her head. Weeks she's been in their cells and still her eyes carry an animal's glassy light, timeless and beyond war. Impossible to imagine that she'd rested like this for ten thousand years—and yet she must have. Her father knew her. She's in the castle records, a thin-lipped figure with gaunt limbs and the sleek, cold spine of a fish. They've gathered a little reel of holograms for similar faces: a woman in the segmented gown of a recordkeeper with high cheekbones and cold stares, an apothecary's bowed assistant stooping for flowers. Pidge had traced the records back, and promised that more lay behind them—that she'd look after they finished the scans for the next planet.

"I would never pretend to more importance than I am worth. A witch is a curseworker or a fortuneteller. You, perhaps, are wise enough to know better than to trust me with a target. It's a sign that you want," Haggar says. "Think of yourself for once. Signs are my trade. I am not yours to protect. What would it cost you to tell the truth?"

Only her pride—only her trust. She knows better than that. "I'd have to be in a far worse position before I'd rely on your confidentiality. Teach me a lesson I could stand to use," Allura whispers, "or don't speak at all."

Lava churns beneath her laughter. "You'll take me as a teacher, but not as a true witch."

"I take you as an opponent. That is all that exists between us."

"Then why should I humor you?" In the silence, Haggar tips her head. "I see. A sign, then, for a fearful crown-seeker."

Allura's fists tighten, shivering at her sides. "Crown-seeker, _child_. I believe I told you once that I'd earned your respect—that I'll _demand_ it if I must."

"Would you prefer," Haggar smiles, all yellow, " _paladin_?"

It lashes through her.

"That," Allura grates, syllable by syllable, "would certainly be an improvement."

"But it's untrue, crown-seeker.You, above all, should know it. _Think_ ," Haggar whispers, close as a confession through the webbing bars. "For ten thousand years, the Lions of Voltron slept waiting for their new paladins to stir and dream and crawl their way into the stars. Did you think it was merely your _good fortune_ that the Blue Lion would have considered you worthy just as the Champion abandoned you?"

"The Lions chose—"

"The Lions chose again because their paladins _drove_ them to the choice. The better question is _who drove the paladins?_ "

"A witch may stand where a paladin does not—but she only holds the place. Hearts such as yours and mine do not have the capacity to yield ourselves to a new cause. You were not chosen as a paladin: Voltron was never meant to bring you into its war. You remain what you always were: Alfor's child, a figure to protect, to stand by as her chosen die on her behalf."

"Alfor's child," Allura whispers, "and your rightful sovereign."

Silence.

Once upon a world, she must have wandered these white halls, watched Zarkon speak with Alfor as they inked out strategies and new designs. If she'd been close, perhaps, she would have stood in the white doorway and considered the prison with the analytic eyes of a visitor. Perhaps she'd known others. "Under different circumstances," Allura says, "you would have been one of my people."

Haggar's hands have fallen, her monstrous face drawn into something quiet, remote. "If I'd never sought love, or wisdom, you mean."

 _Love_. The word jars in dissonance—she doesn't realise that she's echoed it aloud until Haggar's laughter blooms in rich, striking petals between them. 

"Oh, child. You'll never understand, perhaps, how lucky you were that the rest of your kind died when it did. A crown-seeker should never be so quick to flinch."

"Is this another one of your lessons?"

"Haven't you been after my heart from the start?" Haggar's smile lilts. "Crown-seeker. At the least, a witch should know her own mind."

 _Directness._ Allura fists her hands against the echo and the sting: "I know your story, Haggar."

"You put such faith in bedtime tales. Child, you wanted a lesson; so, then, listen to it. The Galra don't understand _love_ as other sentiences do. They prefer force and matter. So: a theory. Imagine love as light. Love, a form of radiation which runs its fingers through each pore and stretches it wide, which throttles the nerves and chars them bare by the fistful. Love as neuropathy: the living senses register a face, a word, a touch. But none of these impact _you_ until their signals have had their data translated, packed into memory storage, prepared to be parsed for meaning. Love without the biological markers," Haggar says, "is only a trick of language. And if love has physical substance, then love carries pain with it by definition."

Allura frowns. It has all the flavor of Haggar's usual nonsense, and yet— "I don't understand."

"I am telling you about power. You," Haggar says, "who carry grief in your bones, the child bowed over with the miseries of all those lost. Muscle memory is the body grieving. Pain is always a convenient lever; and so love for the dead always makes a stronger anchor than any living conviction. With the right channel, grief could be enough to reshape yourself with the rest of the world—"

Haggar's voice coils like a beast swaying under charm. Unwilling, she imagines it: a species which commits to no emotion that cannot be mapped across the neurons.A species of physical demonstrations, confronted with a girl who fidgets before bars.

Her eyelids sink; in the hollows, the haze clouds darker, deeper—Haggar's thoughts sinking against hers in a bright, quicksilver coil. Pressure crowds through Allura's skull, a curling fog's invitation, language turned trap as words eat away at the substance of her thoughts—

Light shocks through the bars.

With a little cry, Haggar slams against the white wall, a flesh-and-bone thunder. On all fours, swaying like an animal, she lifts her head, and her eyes snap with a gutting flare.

At the landing, Allura stands untouched, holding her swordsteel spine and her hands in hangman’s knots. "You offered me a lesson. Yet you ask for empathy, for a species which has never offered any to others. You ask for weaknesses. You're asking whether I've forgotten who I am. The answer is this: I am Allura of Altea, daughter of King Alfor—and one of the few Alteans remaining in this universe. I know my duties."

In slow, rusted jolts, Haggar pries herself back to sitting. "Then, knowing yourself," she says, "you must know that there are few things a creature of my position can provide to a princess. Or have you come to gloat, after all?"

" _No._ " Her knuckles bristle, recoiling. She bites down one breath after the next, wrenches away. "Does it matter? I suppose—I came back because you're still here. I don't ask that you understand."

It isn't, after all, a thought that she understands wholly herself. If only she didn't wake every morning to Coran's unchanging smile, and the shouts of a hundred refugees from across the universe clanging behind him. If she'd been her father's heir in truth—if she'd piloted a lion of her own from the start.

If she'd seen Altea one last time before its fall.

"Don’t take it so askance," Haggar says. "A secret makes for great power. And you’re keeping a great many secrets, aren’t you?"

Her lips thin. "You may be our prisoner for the time being, but you’ve yet to express any interest in becoming an ally to us, Haggar. Even my father would have never extended his deepest trust to an enemy."

"Perhaps not—but he trusted his friends, didn’t he? And in return, they gave to him. Can you say the same of your circumstances?" 

"I would trust the paladins with my life."

"But it wasn’t your life that I was speaking of. Oh," Haggar smiles her livid, entranced smile. "Are you going to claim ignorance of what I mean? Let's make a wager, then. An easy answer for a toothless price." Through the bars she holds out her wrist, splaying her long, pale fingers; her brows only flicker once beneath the hood as light lashes her to bone, fire tearing through her papery skin, her thready veins, to gnaw at bone and marrow. "Come a little closer. Take my hand, and I’ll tell you everything that you need to know."

Allura’s eyes fix on the sight: the burns which slaver and gape across her skin, scar over and strip out again like mirages. "How did you—"

She catches herself, chokes the breath—but Haggar laughs. "A witch trades in secrets, child, and what you are is no secret at all. You burned like a little flame in our flagship; but you're so much brighter now. I saw such a light when Zarkon wielded the Black Lion, fit to strike a quasar to envy. The heirs of Altea have always had that much in common with Voltron: you were made to an end, to fulfill a single task."

 _You have no bargaining power_ , but witch-eyed Haggar's always seen to the root of things. Back she steps—not a surrender but an end to the conversation. "I've always understood the nature of my inheritance," Allura says.

"You understood what your father gave you: the duties of a princess. Is that all you are?"

"If you're trying to _snare_ me again—"

Haggar shuts her eyes as if to seal away the image of such youth. "How will you ever master strength if you can't even master your name? Did you think I was giving you _lessons_ to no end? Witchcraft is an iron brand on the world's sleeping skin. The key to such a mark is _conviction_ : know what you are, and know what you demand of the universe, and make of your demand a fire. Burn what won't yield to you—is there any other way to win an endless war?"

"By all accounts, you're giving me a weapon to turn against you."

Again, a witch's bitter, stewing smile. "As I said. A witch trades in secrets—and the greater the fruit when it's plucked, the greater the reward. 

Resist me, and it'll be all the sweeter to steal."

"I see," Allura says, too quiet.

"You're afraid."

"No," Allura says, and it's true. The rest pours out of her like pity; there is no other way to say it. "I suppose—I'm mourning you. I mourn what you could have been, had my father earned your trust."

"What an honor," Haggar says, clear and cold. "Perhaps I'll mourn you in turn, when you fall."

But it isn't only pity. Her lungs cloud and crowd with questions, still: _did you ever fear dying? Your fixed point lies in stasis light-years away from you, neither alive nor dead. Your only ally won't buy your return. You betrayed our kind for a madman. Is there nothing left that you fear?_

_Is fearlessness worth the cost, for witches?_

"Think, crown-seeker. Are these the duties of a princess?" Haggar says. "Your father died twice, and never alone. How ambitious you must be, to think of outdoing him so soon."

Her breath catches. Too quick, Allura says, "Do you _prefer_ your empty cell? I could leave you to it."

"You could," Haggar says.

Her eyes are unsparing, but they do not see in Allura her father's ghost, her mother's, the last pinned hopes of a court dead for millennia. She is not a weapon here, a key or an answer—only an enemy, all her edges crystallised and refined to the battles she's won between them. Only the relic of a world long lost, and the secret she's keeping behind it.

The silence holds, suspended on the breaths of two heads bent together.  


# *

  
Green.

Something’s wafting under his nose, a green, prickly reek. 

"Hey," a voice says. "Hey, bud." It chimes in his ear, a rounded eager voice crimped around the edges. "Wake up slowly, all right? Just take it nice and easy, breathe in and out, all that good stuff. I’ve got food. And I’ve got you. So everything’s good, you just have to take it easy."

All at once, memory comes tearing back. "Shiro?" He turns his head into the blurry world. "Shiro—"

But the blur glows clean and steadies into a round face and pinched brows beneath a sagging headband. "Hunk," Keith says, blank as glass. "What’re you—"

The hand splayed along his spine tightens, and Hunk waggles his blunt fingers. "Hey, man, it’s just me! Like I said, don't freak out. Breathe. Keep breathing. Don't punch me, don't fall over—let's just try to take everything easy, okay?"

Around them, the room's cutting back in flashes of gleaming steel: shelves and counters, walls striped with power currents, the hangar's great hollow alcoves and glittering barriers stripped out for stoves and nozzles. Memory fizzles, exhausted. "Where’s the Black Lion?" Keith says—and then he’s bolting up out of his seat. His ankles give way beneath him—just in time for Hunk to snag his arm.

" _C'mon_ ," he says, and something in Keith answers to it after all; his body goes slack, netted in Hunk's unspoken command. 

With great care, Hunk slings his arm over his shoulders and bears him over to the kitchen's shining round table. "Black’s still down in the hangar, the last time I checked. I picked you up from the floor just outside its shield. Can you feel something? You know," Hunk twitches two fingers in the air with his free hand,"through your lion bond?"

"It’s not _my bond_ ," Keith says, too sharp. But the shivering edges of his vision're clearing up after all, bolting into familiar crystal lines: glassy countertops, high rafters strung with drying alien fruits and vegetables, capsules of unfamiliar preservatives, a crystal stove burbling to itself at the far end of the island. "This... isn’t the hangar."

Hunk puffs out a bubble of a sigh. "I guess Lance was serious. You’re really sleeping down there now." He props his chin on a wrist, watching. "I don’t know how you do it. I mean, I _know_ how, but I kinda don’t get it either. Pillows are pretty great."

He doesn't have time for this. His knuckles bristle against the table and Keith anchors his weight, hauls himself to his feet. "I have to get back down there, I have to—" 

But a broad grip snaps around his wrist. "Come on, man," Hunk says, a little plaintive. "How many hours’ve you been sleeping?"

"I sleep _enough._ " Keith jerks, but Hunk holds on. His eyes grit, narrowing. "The Black Lion wouldn’t let me in if she didn’t think I could fly."

Hunk's heavy brows pull down; his shoulders square as if to grit down some greater ache—but he's not made for the same kind of conflict that Lance and Pidge might be. His shoulders settle; his mouth's static-flat line unravels. "I’m not saying you can’t take it. I’m—actually, maybe I don’t know what I’m asking. What were you doing down there before you fell asleep? You gotta tell me something," Hunk adds before Keith can bite out his answer, "or I’m not letting you go. And! And you're also gonna have to eat something. Yeah."

He swallows. The flex flares through his throat like a match striking oil. "I'm not hungry," Keith says, low. He pushes to his feet. Hunk stares back, round jaw set with something a little other than fear. "Do you ever think about anything that isn't _food_?"

_Bang._

A fist thunders the table—Hunk's knuckles grind steel.

"What do you want me to talk about, Keith?" he says, and it's nervy and rough, too loud. He wheels an arm."Look. I get it. I _know_ you don't wanna talk to anybody about what's happening to you—that's kinda your thing, and _I get that_ —but you know, I've been sorta stranded on my own out here. 

"Do you want me to talk about machines?" he adds, before a syllable brims to Keith's mouth. "'Cause I can do that! But let's face it, Pidge's the brainiac around here and if you wanna do any of the serious innovation stuff, something that's gonna make a real difference in battle? We're gonna have to go to her! You know," he waves, frantic, "I used to write letters to my grandma? She's got a phone and everything, but she always said _letter-writing's a dying art, Enele, how're you gonna court yourself any girls if you won't practice your love letters?_ So I'd write her every week about anything, the food at the Garrison and she'd yell at me for not just getting a big fire going outside, it's not like the desert doesn't have _rocks_ , Enele, and any good grocery store's gonna have coconut cream, even Walmart's got some of that watered-down stuff!"

"Hunk," Keith says, a slipping breath, but Hunk barrels on with his head sunk like charging horns.

"You know how long she hasn't heard from me?" His voice quavers before it leaps, eyes blown wide and his every gesture crackling into a storm. "'Cause I don't! I figured it'd be better if I didn't keep track, and it's seriously not better, Keith, it's totally just _not._ You know I can't even estimate this stuff? It's not like we really recorded when we started getting to work, and the first time I can find anything with a handle on the timeline's, like, three missions in! We could've been up here for _months_ —definitely longer than three months, maybe less than a year! And I'm trying, I'm _really_ trying to be rational about this, man. I'm thinking, any equation you wanna solve needs a given value, but I don't even know what I'm _doing_ , and I gotta keep it together, everybody's keeping it together and man, we are really doing _good_ , you know? We've got this crazy Galra prince _hunting_ the same thing we are. So now all we have to do is stop him from getting it and he's toast! Right? _Wrong_. Because even once he's done, _we still have the rest of the universe counting on us to fix them_. Pidge's still looking for her brother and we're living in the rooms where Allura used to keep her family or her court or something and sometimes I feel like she's looking at us like we're wrong—like she doesn't even think we're real and she doesn't get why we're here. And you," his voice stutters, "you really messed Lance up, man, you _scared_ him with all that stuff about Shiro-Shiro- _Shiro_. So Lance's going crazy, trying to hold everybody together, Lance's the one who gets to blow up about this stuff, Lance is—"

He stops, stares at Keith's stark, stunned eyes. His fists sink.

"I mean," Hunk says, "I get it. All right? We've got a lot going on. I know that it's not good. But food's the same." A broad palm claps the nape of his neck, rubs it as if to smooth down his own bristling. "Ever since we got here, we've been to, what, fifty planets? Everybody's everywhere gotta eat. And food's—y'know, something you don't really have to be perfect at. People don't always wanna _know_ where their next meal's coming from, but they like knowing it's gonna come, and that it might not even come out of a tube. So it's easy. Can't we just," the laugh crackles in his lungs before it eddies, "have one easy thing out here?"

Silence.

Hunk shifts from heel to heel; his shoulders bow as if beneath its grey weight. This could be the most they've ever talked outside of a mission—the most that they've ever looked at each other, that he's ever shaped a thought past _yellow lion_ and _cook_ and _blocking the hall_ , a liability at the steering wheel after eight hours of driving, a meaningless shadow looming at Lance's shoulder, a wide grin talking trash about Galra blood like he doesn't know any better. 

_You know, I've been sorta stranded on my own out here._

His mouth works, but Keith pulls back to slouch against the table. "Why Enele?"

Hunk stares, hollow-eyed, but only for a moment. "Well, I mean—she really liked that name, man. I don't get it either. My mom thought it sounded like, uh," he reddens. "Something different, I guess? Beats me. But my grandma just kinda hung onto it anyway. She just kept saying there's no rule a kid only ever gets one name. She still calls me that. She fixes buses," he volunteers, too, in that nervous way that Hunk does when he's jittering. "Her house's pretty close to the highway, so the conductors can usually drag out to her before breaking down. She used to let me climb on one of the engines when I was just a kid. Actually, I'm pretty sure I remember her letting me sleep in there one night."

It's hard to think of what to say to that. Keith furrows his brows. "Does it mean something? _Enele_."

Hunk gives him a pug-nosed look. "It means _name my grandma calls me_ , man."

They stare, slung to cross-purposes again; Keith's shoulders bow. "You wanted to talk," he says. "Did that—help?"

"Not really. Actually," Hunk says. He flicks his fingertips in a helpless little twitch. "I'm not exactly like out to talk about this stuff either, you know? I wanna make sure you know that—I get why you don't. Just—like I said," he laughs, uncertainty hazing the words like static, "it just gets kinda lonely out here if you're not used to hanging out by yourself all the time. 

"Don't get me wrong, though," he adds, "Pidge's _great_. She would've blown all the guys at the Garrison out of the water in a couple months if she'd been thinking about them. But now that we're getting serious, she's always off—running everything with Slav. I think she knows more about the castle tech than the Ancients did now. Even the Blades don't try to mess with her designs anymore. But either she's sleeping, or she's making a new search parameter to filter all the data for her family, or some other big project. She knows what she's doing—the last thing she needs's somebody getting in her way. And Allura's down in the cells most of the time—and for aliens who're experiencing the miracle of kovek seasoning for the first time, Slav and the Blade of Marmora are surprisingly not picky eaters. 

"It's not that I don't get it," he ends in a rush, winding back to the start, "You're almost as bad as Pidge—you've got Black Paladin stuff to do, you want to get back down there, that’s fine. But it'd be nice to see you sometimes, man. It's not like you really _hang out_ with any of us. So—even if you don't tell me anything. Just, you know." He taps his own chest, then pokes Keith's. "Crew to crew."

Keith’s eyes swing from Hunk’s, rounded and worried, down to his fists. There’s a pulse still caught in his knuckles—he’d pounded on the carapace of the Black Lion until his fists pulsed with the unfinished blow, shouting until his lungs crackled with the rasp. 

"Shiro," he says—hears the sawtooth edges to his voice. His fists flex. "He stopped talking to me."

Hunk tenses. "Hold on, hold on—what does that mean? Are you saying he’s _gone_?"

" _No._ " The Black Lion sparks in his skull, all the promise of her crackling, spacebound fury ringing in his ears. "I can still _feel_ him, it’s just—you know how your Lion feels, right? They're not _alive_ —but they're not just machines, either. The way they think right after a battle’s different than the way they think in the hangar. But the Black Lion isn’t my original lion. When I reach out for the Black Lion, Shiro’s always _there_ —it’s like the one thing that both of us understand. And now the lion's getting clearer. He’s still there—but it’s getting harder and harder to reach him."

"You're sure he's in there, right? The real one, not—"

" _I know him._ "

It lashes out, and the thundering flinch comes after, after—he hadn't known when they'd torn back from the mission with Lotor, when the castle'd drawn his battered stolen cruiser into the hangar. He'd been first to climb onto the pod's thick snout to drag open its roof, take Shiro's weight as they came out together. He'd steadied himself beneath the weight of the shadow's steel hand, looked at the gravity of Shiro's dark eyes, and thought—

"He could," Hunk says, slow and nervous, "be planning something in there. I mean, the guy survived—a year with the Galra. He’s been leading Voltron since the beginning, and he’s still holding on even after he got sucked into the headspace of a psychic alien robot lion from outer space. I’m just saying—he's been through a lot, man. He’s not just gonna throw that away." He stops, rusting on the brink of certainty. "Right?"

It's the practical answer, the kind that should mean something—but even if he hadn't guessed, he's known Shiro since the day he'd watched Shiro spin through simulations, watched the easy settling of his fingers along the wheel, the way his brows drew down with his laugh as the needle swung to red on the speed dial. He'd stayed and stayed, but what for?

_If anything happens to me, I want you to lead Voltron._

"He’s been trying to figure out then Black Lion’s secrets," Keith says, and at once every conversation's unraveling: his distance during their urneal summer nights, the way existence had spilled over into three layers inside, dimension layered over dimension until the body unraveled. Every time, he'd hauled himself out of the trance, fizzing down to his ions, glad just to breathe while Shiro stood charged and waiting in the dark. "Everything that I've been throwing at Lotor’s fleet—that was stuff that Shiro showed me from inside the Black Lion's head. I let him do it—I didn't _think_. This whole time, he’s just been slipping deeper, looking for more _strategies_."

"We needed those strategies," Hunk says, careful, and Keith's eyes swing onto him like bristling.

"We need Shiro _more_."

Hunk claps his fingers together, presses his mouth to the seam. "Okay, so," he says. "Maybe we’re thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe black magic or something weird got Shiro into the Black Lion, but that doesn’t mean technology can’t get him out. Even if it's not a total machine, it's still part-program, right? That means it's gotta have databanks. Shiro must be in there. Maybe we can download him into—"

"Stop _saying_ that."

It rings, bitten and snarled. He breathes through the shallow aftermath; Hunk's stepped away, giving him space like a man with a feral animal. He forces his hands to quiet, tries to speak through the clawed-open stretch of his throat. "There’s no _maybe_ , Hunk. He's not _going_ anywhere."

Quiet, Hunk says, "Man, I'm gonna ask you something, and it'd be great if you thought about it for a sec before you hit me, 'cause I'm serious." He stops. "Why _didn't_ you tell anyone you were hearing him?"

 _Why_. Buried in the question's a flicker of fault: if he'd told them, Pidge might've been able to run diagnostics. Coran could have pored through the castle records. Even the Blades might have coughed up a favor or two for a new member, stretching through their network for some trace of what druid magic had infected the lion over Zarkon's hunting millennia.

He'd kept Shiro in the dark, thinking that words alone could be enough to pull him back from the brink.

 _Maybe, maybe._ "You know why," he says, too rough, and Hunk looks away. "I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up. For a while, I didn't even know if he was—really _there_. And even if he wasn't—"

He cuts off, but still it's thick enough to hear the echo. 

"I'm not saying this stuff," Keith says, "because I'm scared. I'm saying it because I know. There's no _plan_ , Hunk. I've talked to him. I can feel it. It's Shiro—really Shiro. And he's going to do what it takes to get us through the war even if it means he doesn't come back. It's just the way he is."

"Hey, man, don't—" Hunk says, too quick. "C'mon, Keith, don't make that face. I mean, this team thing works both ways, right? We can save him too."

Keith laughs, short and sharp. Hunk's fingerpoints burn sharp as stars over his skin, the wrong pressure and the wrong warmth—and still he aches beneath their weight.

"I don't think anyone's ever saved him," he says. "His whole life—people have just _looked_ to him, and he's always taken it. It's like he's never needed saving before."

Those aren't the words he needs—but then, he can't be sure that he knows the ones he does. Casting memory back, there's only a line drawn through the dust: before and after. Meeting Shiro'd been like shattering smeared glass: light came flooding through, the whole world reshaped beneath the movement.

"I used to think he changed me," Keith says, nonsensical. "But that wasn't what he wanted—he never asked me to be any different for him. He just looked at me one day and and it was like everything fell into place." 

He gasps, laughing. 

"I told him—the best day I'd ever had was when he told me I meant something to him. That wasn't it. It's never been about me proving who I had to be to _him_ , meaning something to _him_ —"

The last words wither on his tongue. His fists go slack. Without a word, Keith drops to his knees as Hunk presses a broad palm to his back. _I've got you, man, I've got you,_ murmuring above him. He shuts his eyes fit to stitch his lashes together. Listens to the words, the cadence, but not the voice—pretends, just for a little while.  


# *

  
Days whirl by.

Overhead, an alarm shrills blue-blue-ice-blue, blaring on the edge of sight as an automaton's spear lashes in, as a spray of laser fire snarls from the farthest wall. A thousand blows at once—but Keith parries, sparking steel. He twists with the automaton's lunge, spins and ducks its arm, drives his bayard through its spinal cord. 

" _End training sequence_ ," he bites out as the automaton goes tottering past, as it stutters and sags and evaporates into a flourish of digitised sparks; his glance snaps to the far wall.

From the screen, Kolivan nods once over his folded arms. _Better,_ he says, and turns on his heel. The holoprojection blots out.

He arrows for the control room, still sweat-sleek and straining with the good, mindless kind of ache. Above them looms a sizeable projection reeling with constellations; the castle-ship flickers and beats where it swings towards a pulsing target. At its bottom-right corner sits a new display: the ordinary numbers of a countdown.

Hunk catches his eye, a brief flicker, and ducks his head.

Maybe they don't know how long they've been in space, the season or the days lost—but it's something worth tracking all the same.

The rest of the crew's already gathered around each console; Slav perched on the shoulder of their latest Blade representative, hissing into its ear; Pidge buried to the waist in a wired cocoon, wrapped always in eternal repairs and upgrades. Only Lance's unchanged: in the pilot's seat, cheering himself on. His eyes jitter wild with caffeine, but he flashes Keith a grin when he enters, a burst of high-wired forgiveness before his focus darts back to the screen.

"Actually in time for once! _Easy,_ baby... all right," Lance calls over his shoulder, and begins the intricate parking sequence, lever after lever. "We're in place! Locked and ready."

"That leaves only the other parties," Allura says. Over the planetary visits, she's retired to the seat at the farthest end of the room, hands clasped in her lap and her spacesuit traded for the heavy princess's gowns. "Keith," she says.

"I know."

They've been orbiting this plan for weeks—circling through Zarkon's old routes while Lotor plants spies and ambushes like mines through a starry field. He doesn't know where all of his father's stored powers lie—strength fit to conquer galaxies does not, apparently, translate to thoroughness in bureaucracy—but he knows enough to make himself dangerous. 

But Voltron's far from alone.

He moves forward, stops at the primary control station. "I talked to Kolivan. He's been bringing on allies for a couple weeks. He can bring them in when Lotor's fleet moves in—but we'll only get one wave. If Lotor's got reinforcements, they won't handle it."

From her coding rig, now a tower of ominous red-eyed alarms, Pidge pumps a fist. "That's a piece of cake. I set disruptors in orbit—they're supposed to piggyback off the local satellites, which should take care of the whole system. Once they're activated, nothing's going to be able to warp in anywhere close to a day's flight this time." She spins in her chair, cross-legged, and scratches her chin. "He could probably sense them if he was looking, though. The whole area's been blacked out."

"That sounds pretty suspicious," Hunk says. "Doesn't that mean he's gonna know exactly which spots to hit up? Even before we get there?"

"It'd look like a trap even if he _could_ see," Keith says, foregoing the talk of strategy. Lance's been half-right, as usual: you have to spare what you must and burn what you can't. "We're not gonna keep him here for more than a day."

"We won't need to."

His eyes slant to Allura, who meets them with glassy arrogance. Over the days, she's quieted, gone colder. Her face is porcelain, the gleam of it sickly as souring milk. "Right," Keith says. "The plan."

She barely lifts her head, stiff as doll-skinned porcelain. "There is no need for you to concern yourself with my strategy. You have your parts; I will do mine." She rises. "Now, if you'll excuse me—"

Keith's voice carries over the hall as she turns. "You can’t keep doing this."

In the quiet, her knuckles stiffen against her thighs. "The alternative is to give Lotor all the power he asks. This is our only option."

"How are we supposed to know that?" He strides forward. "I keep telling you not to act like Shiro—but at least Shiro _trusted_ us."

She spins back to meet him, sure as a star in her own dominion. "That was when we had no secrets worth keeping from Voltron," Allura says, with ice in her teeth. "The situation's changed. _I_ need your trust now. Do I have it, or do I not?"

The room plunges into an icewater silence. 

Lance and Hunk swap looks—Pidge squares her shoulders. Keith says, brittle and vicious, "Shiro's not _gone_ —"

"But he isn't here," Allura says, and shuts her eyes. "I've given you time, Keith—as much as I could. Shiro led, but you don't want to be what he was. If you won't take on his mantle, I will."

Her eyes hold against his, mirrors to knives. 

Whatever bristling'd leapt between his teeth, impact cracks it loose. Every screen tilts, and Allura braces against the table. The last planet's glowing livid on their screen—the clouds boil as they circle in orbit, and the continents seem to stretch and rust beneath their eyes. 

Pidge clatters through strings of keys; Hunk's already scrubbing at the screen as if to scrub out the stain. "That's not a good sign!" he calls.

Every screen flares up with an intricacy of symbols, bay windows meshed and littered with diagrams. Pidge narrows her eyes. "The readings are off the chart—it's like this place has five times the life of everything else that we've landed on!"

"Land," Allura says.

Keith turns his head. For a beat, her face layers over with an animal's livid eyes, the stinging white teeth of a little beast. Another, and she's a girl again. "The Blades're still calling people in," he says. "We're not gonna be in position for another couple hours. Hunk—what's the last data on Lotor's forces?'

"A couple thousand ships?" Hunk quavers. Five holos go spinning up from his console: drifting heavy-bellied ships like steel whales. "They're those hydrofighters and warcruisers, though. We can outrun them, but if we're gonna be sticking in place, the castle's gonna have a pretty tough time holding the spot. I'm not saying we can't do it. Voltron could take them one at a time, but that's not gonna do much for the planet."

" _It doesn't matter._ " Allura's already shaking her head, trembling until her hair clouds and her breaths spill out in a frenzy. "You'll need to hold them off using the lions separately—we must go _now_."

"Allura," Keith says.

At once, her hands clamp over the arms of her chair, gritting pale—but not enough to mask her tremors. "You must take me down to the surface," she whispers—but the syllable jars through her and she nearly pitches off her chair. "Land _now_ , and I'll tell you everything after it's over! Please!"

Every eye's settled on him. They trust Allura, but hers isn't the only life at stake.

Heartbeats hammer by: one after another, and then a cascade of a storm.

The Black Paladin takes his helmet from the dashboard, presses it between his palms. "You heard her," Keith says, and his voice gleams like a steel crown. "I'll get Kolivan."  


# *

  
The Black Lion falls.

The battle'd opened wide as soon as they'd swung into the system—Pidge had barely bought them time enough to bring the lion down. But that's no matter: the gangplank reels out and Allura goes plunging down the steps to tumble into the flowers.

Pollen puffs up with her fall, a sucklesweet mist into a forlorn breeze. The meadow burns livid with summer blossoms; the horizon roars with a white tide. The planet is roiling with life; its quintessential heart beats beneath her outstretched fingers like an animal's waiting for the knife. 

For no reason at all, she thinks of the castle's long, polished halls, her grandmother's favorite chair, its arms worn shining where her palms had rested. _I won't risk my father's legacy. Coran, you must protect the Castle of Lions._

 _Princess,_ he'd said, all his frothy mannerisms boiled clean. Altea at its core was steel—Coran could be no less.

A vision jars her, so sharp that she nearly cries out: a shadow moving through the windows of the castle, bleached driftwood plunging through space, an artificial shrine lit in vigil of all their lost things. It's not clear, in the daylight, whether the image tore itself out of her own mind or some future stream—there's only her wrists shaking with the thunder caught in her veins.

Her father would have set the castle ablaze rather than let it fall, potentially, into enemy hands—but she trusts to Coran's sense of purpose. The rest's beyond her now.

A shadow sways over her head, sinking close. Behind her, the Black Lion stands guard. Its eyes darken, and Keith hefts himself out of the cockpit. He drops into the meadow, scattering petals, and rises. He looks tired too—smudges beneath his eyes as if ash-lined, his lips cracked—but his brows drive through the same deep furrows, and his eyes are steel. If she sprang at him now, he'd cut her down and be sorry only after: a warleader at last.

He stops before her; a broken flower twists under his boot as he shifts. "Can you do this?"

"I have to—"

"That wasn't the question," Keith says, and Allura stills.

There's no sympathy in Keith. History had cored it out of him, or perhaps he'd never had it. If he's asking, it's to a practical end. 

Her fists tighten in the grass, bristling with little green blades. She swallows the dust on her tongue. "How long have you known?"

"I didn't." Daylight hollows his face with shadows, but the pinch of his mouth's bright enough to resound. "I still don't. Whatever you've been doing with Haggar, with the quintessence—I don't even _understand_ it. And right now, I don't think I care. You got us into this. We came with you because saving the universe was the right thing to do—but we'd never have gotten this far without you."

For a moment she sees him as a double image. In his armor he stands like a soldier—sunlight strikes white through his hair, draws the ghost of it to stand behind him, Shiro's hands settled on his shoulders, flesh and black-hinged steel—

But it's only the Black Lion behind them. Allura laughs, a sound hollowed thin enough to mirror. A garden's worth of wildflowers sway and stir with her voice. "You're blaming me. I suppose you've every reason."

"No," Keith says, and his black frown unravels. "I'm telling you that you have to come back."

Her head snaps up; Keith's gaze holds hers, dizzying and glittering like clustered stars.

"This isn't about Voltron," he says. "I know we're in a war. Losing people's a risk. We're never going to get rid of that completely. But people aren't sacrifices. We have to fight to win for everyone, or we shouldn't be fighting at all. So," he says, steady-eyed. "Come back."

Her fingers graze grass; she wants to reach out to him, catch his white paladin's gloves in her bare hands. He's looking at her, for once, clear-eyed: not as an obstacle or as a princess or the ghost struggling to hold Shiro's place, but as a member of Voltron, understanding come too softly and too late. Secrets curl on her tongue; she wants to whisper to him of the silver she sees in his shadow—

But she could fail, yet, and leave him with only ashes.

In an instant, she's jolted to her feet. A hand catches each shoulder, and she grits away his startlement. "When I required you most, you gave me your cooperation without question," she whispers, and the planet's veins thrum to her sound—it's a wonder that he can't hear it: the loamed veins singing their way to bloom. "I ask for only a little more time—just a little more patience."

Keith’s eyes darken, considering. "Is that an order?"

Black and white. It's a wonder that the Black Lion didn't look to him first—when Keith knows what he wants, everything in his path is either an order or an obstacle. "It isn't," Allura says—but her lungs are swelling as if to a glassblower's malice. She chokes down the cough, goes on. "If all goes correctly, this battle will look a little different than the ones you’re used to. The Red Lion chose you for one reason; the Black Lion protected you for another. From what I've learned about witches, you should have everything you need—but you must follow your instincts. Don’t ask me what it means," she adds, stark and fierce. "It isn't an order, Keith. I was mistaken. I'm not in a position to command you. I only ask that you—"

"Shut up," he says, half-smiling, "and trust me."

She frowns at his mouth, but only by habit. "Approximately," says the princess of Altea, and understands the sibilance at last: an echo of all the echoes which might have come. 

This is not the first time she has asked him for trust. It will be the last.

Fire snarls the air. Their heads snap up as the Green Lion snarls through a cloud. Pidge twists in orbit before she reorients; the lion kicks its heels through the troposphere and fires back into space, gone in instants. 

Allura turns, an order on her tongue; but Keith's already heading back to the Black Lion, its eyes alight.

For a heartbeat, she aches for him: this boy who moves like he came cored out of some forever war. Lance, Pidge, Hunk—they were chosen as paladins, and adapted to it.

It's hard to imagine that he'll ever belong to a world without something to save.

"Keith," she calls, and it's harsh and high in her lungs. "I _will_ come back."

He only cocks a wave like they’re running the circuit of the planet. 

The Black Lion swallows him whole, neat as any beast taking its prey, and then they're rising into the steam-pale sky. Past the unshattered sky, a battle's raging—through the fierce sunlight she can see sparks, flashes of white. Her paladins, four stars burning—keepers of a peace whose roots have long been torn out. 

Those are past her concern: what she can change burns in her veins.

With careful fingers, she presses her fingers into the earth. In the shadows of her eyelids she dreams her father's clear trust, imagines calling to him. Altea had burst, wrecked the legacy of millennia—but not everything. Here, on this last pillar of Zarkon's strength, she can buy back a little of what they've lost. 

She was not made for war—the peacekeeper, the cage-hating child who'd broken the circuit on the entire lower circuit, once. Alfor would have never wanted this for her—and still, here she stands. A voice that's lied to each of her paladins, a girl who's bent and schemed with a traitor. A power on her own terms with a world beating beneath her like a heart laid bare, trusting that the universe will answer.

Here, at last, she can't be saved.

" _Wake_ ," Allura whispers to the earth, and hears the stars surge to answer to her witching voice as the quintessence of every planet they'd searched floods into its core.  


# *

  
He slams out of the atmosphere and into space.

It jars like it always does, rocketing from gravity into emptiness—and all around him the universe's spinning into a wreck of silent fire. Ships are sprawling everywhere: Lotor's massed his army in waves, cruisers gleaming starry pinpricks between the vast wrought dreadnoughts. The battlefield's already pocked with little fires and broken fragments; the atmosphere's ringed like an asteroid field. 

Some great scrap of steel comes hurtling towards the planet. In the cockpit, Keith's hands race from control to control with the kind of memory that's born not made, fingers settling over the black grips as if to reshape each other. The Black Lion's lazy eyes flare; a ripple stirs, swallows it whole into some black pocket of starved, amnesiatic space.

_Love as matter. Love as a physical process._

A witch's voice burns briefly in his ears, echoes of some exchange never made, before Allura's overrides her: _It is the nature of matter that the universe conserves what it makes. What exists may change shape, but it will endure. If love acts as a force, if love transforms—_

_I won't put my faith in Galra philosophy, or in a witch's spells. But I trust you, Keith. Follow your instinct._

Spinning through the heart of a space battle, Keith breathes out. His grip tightens over the gear.

"Come back to me," he says.

The cockpit shivers, disintegrates. The world thaws and firms into a double-vision: ships suspended around him as the Black Lion goes loping through empty space, charging, brightening. Fighterships whirl around them, cannons reeling to realign with their target—and he's on the field, hauling every lever it takes to drag the Black Lion into a ghost of the Red Lion's flexibility, but her legs are his, her long loping overflowing into his charge, and he's plummeting head over heels into the dark, stars everywhere, fields and worlds, every memory laid open beneath his heels. Lotor's army clouds on and on, a fleet of hungry ghosts. Ahead there's a star burning, white-violet-white, a name on the tip of his tongue—

"Shiro!"

The last of the world goes out.

He's a memory now, a voice not his own, a name ringing in his ears, flattened to smudgy print instead of living sound. Memory traces the back of his skull, all inky residue: he'd landed back in the hangar with Shiro's breath curling on his tongu, rattled some blank nonsense to the crew over his speakers— _go up without me, I'll hit the showers later._ Under all his rambling, he'd been conscious only of the empty glow, hollow-lit; the press of his palms to the pilotchair's arms, black-white-violet, touch and sound and the taste of his own voice—

 _Shiro,_ he'd said, reaching back.

No answer.

_Shiro. You don’t have to let me in—just let me know you’re there. Just tell me you’re still in there._

_I know you can hear me. You have to. I’m fine. You didn’t hurt me, all right? You’re not going to. I know you. The Black Lion's on our side._

—but that's not enough—that's a start, not an answer. _Shiro_ , and his voice drops as if through a vast hollow, falling into the same dusty stars—

Galaxies reel. The universe whirls backwards and his body withers out of nothing with it, lead-boned and paper skin, his-body-not-his. Limbs too long, shoulders broad and scarring.

 _Shiro_.

A memory: masked and white-coated, they'd torn him down to strips on a dissecting table, shot him up with things that choked ink at the back of his throat, drinks that spun stars through the backs of his eyes, left him screaming as he struggled to think like a soldier, like a rank number, singing childhood songs over and over until the notes had burst out of his throat, hoarse as birdsong. The technicians had laughed—prodded him until he'd squeezed the notes down. After that he'd counted on scraps of phrases, meaningless things to spout when they questioned him. _Gene expression in protozoans exposed to freezing temperatures and zero gravity. Five hours. Astrometry._

 _I want to tell you a secret_.

They'd driven the needles in pin by pin, lined him up for port installations, fried his nerves alive until he writhed on the table, steel against his spine, steel boiling down to his marrows. Haggar had stood by, bright-eyed and waiting, her mouth lined with a witch's livid delight. 

He'd known, then: no one was coming. No one would save him.

"I'm here, Shiro—you have to _listen_ —"

Memory: listening, ears pricked and shoulders stiff. He's still adjusting to the arm, but the freedom to move comes less easily to him now. He's in the arena and his hands are cold. When he's finished here, they'll send him back to the cells; this is what he was made for. This: his fingers boiling violet over a bared blue throat.

_You promised you'd come back._

Memory: red behind his eyes, red scorching hot along his palms—a fever. The cell's metallic floor spills out beneath his fingers, and he scrabbles to grip it until his fingers ache. He'd won the match—he _knows_ he won this time. The ringleaders'd set him against a twin pair of fighters, one of whom'd tucked themselves behind a pillar and leapt out only when the other skidded out of sight. He'd taken them both in the end, driven them into a corner and cracked their thin necks one after another, stumbled back to the cells with the drag and shove of grim-jawed, laughing guards, their savaging pleasure like thunder: _won us some decent change with that last match. Might still get a champion out of you one of these days._

Alone the champion lies dreaming, the cell floor cool against his cheek, shadows of milling prisoners washing over him in a tentative tide as he rots and writhes. In the dark behind his eyelids, the cell doors wheel open, flooding him with white light, fingertips down his cheek. Farther down the hall, a fireburst roars. The walls rattle, and then thin arms come to bear him up, the corded strength of a boy grown tall. 

"Shiro," a voice says, the same coppery voice that'd called out to him in Garrison halls and desert nights.

His fingers flex, aching to map the dark, slashing brows again, the seam of his mouth. _Keith._. He knows the scruff that sways behind his ears, his too-stern fox's jaw—he'd dreamed of it, traced its shape on stone in the dark before he'd set the dream aside. But his fingertips are steel now, crackling as if with static. He reaches up and jerks away in the same delirious heartbeat: he's filthy and he can't be trusted to smear that cheek. 

"How," he says instead, hoarse as a crow in some filthy pit at the back-end of the universe. "How did you find—you shouldn't be here, you _can't_ ," even as he leans into that too-thin chest, aches to feel its familiar pulse. "There are other prisoners with me—a lot of them have been kept for much longer than a year. We have to get to them before the Galra realise—" His breath staggers. He can't think. "Keith, I'm _sorry_ —" 

_Sorry_ for this weakness, pressing his strange metal fingers through that tufted hair, touch for the sheer spoiling sake of it—but the strands are filth-ragged, flashing red between his fingers, and Keith melts away to the dark as another boy's high voice says, in the wrong English, the wrong sound: "who is—Shiro, he isn't _here_ , and my dad's getting—please, you have to wake up, _I can't go back out there_ —"

"You're dreaming, Shiro!"

What was then is now is everywhere. Here: copper to the roots of his teeth. Here: bruises puffing and roiling down his jaw. Here: cradling memory between his empty hands, the shape of a cadet's spine bowing with the slide of his palm—

But it hadn't been the crest of a shoulderblade beneath his weaponising hand—it'd been a hand clasping his shoulder, _good to have you back_ , a voice which carried a thousand times over, _you mean your bayard._ Late nights fending off his punches with a coarse metal arm, cushioning the brunt of his shoulder, rumbling to the delight as they shot through a scattered asteroid belt together, scattering stars, fingers curling hard on his brakes as he'd blared lightstruck warnings, coaxing and waiting for the boy to learn—

" _Shiro_ ," Keith says, and Shiro looks up at him after all, stark-eyed and lost. "You have to focus. Please."

They're in the starscape again, but the stars are trembling. Memories whirl around them, image crumbling udner image. The Black Lion's voice crowds at the back of his mind: her cockpit, her canopy switch, the radar-range sweep, the oxygen regulator, pump and rheostat and a string of brakes, thrilling hot to the surge of his pulse, his electric heart. Every wire flexes in him, tensing.

"You have to go," he says. His throat rattles dry. "This place—it's falling apart."

"It's not a place—this is _you_."

Shiro looks at him, lion-eyed. "The war's not over—Voltron needs you. You understand that."

The words carry and twist, dissonance of sound split between voice and reverberation. Shiro hears the hollowness, the ring like metal hammered thin as notepaper, and Keith hears it too: the same thought splits between them.

"I know," Keith says.

"There's nothing I can do," he says, and sees his pilot's brows snap together, furrowing. "You know you have to go back, pilot. It's not worth staying here—not now. I've shown you everything I can do."

"That's the _Lion_ —you're getting mixed up in the Black Lion, Shiro—"

The roar swells in their ears, a universe's noise condensed to a physical blow. "You have to go," Shiro says again. The stars are spilling away, and he's unraveling, too. Elsewhere, in another sky, they are sweeping the field, sensors engaged and target locked on auto. The enemy ships are withering, as Voltron intends—but Voltron is here-not-here. "I can't—hold the battle and you at the same time." His skull rings with his own words, iron in his teeth. "Everything else, anything you see here—it's not _real_."

"You're here," Keith says, and Shiro shudders. " _You're real to me._ "

"You have to let this go—pilot—"

"It's _Keith_." Fingers claw along his wrists, Keith's eyes all demand, but Shiro looks at him as if he's never anchored anyone, a world spinning adrift. He's shaking, shaking beneath the weight of a double-image: a pilot with his eyes slung away, a lion amid stars restless like a real animal, something swaying beneath's a fly's idle circuit. " _Listen to me._ " 

Stars showering from a thousand constellations, he breathes.

"Your name is Shiro. Takashi Shirogane. No one ever calls you that. You had parents. An aunt. A grandmother. I don't think you had any siblings."

"I used to think," he says, "that I knew you like no one else did. You make the worst choices for the people who can't, and you get us through them. You don't cook. You can fall asleep _anywhere_. We drove out from the Garrison a couple times when we were there together—supply runs, stuff like that. You'd go five miles under the speed limit whenever I said something that made you mad. You like singing to folk songs and these _really_ bad golden-oldies. You're the reason I even know what _golden-oldie_ means. I don't know what your favorite color is, but I'm pretty sure you don't care that much. On the last night before Kerberos, you took the afternoon off and we drove out. You said they were opening a place with real burgers in town—but I'm guessing even you didn't believe that. We drove around for a couple hours until we got to sunset, and then we just sat outside Garrison grounds, watching a holoprojection of some dumb racing movie on a dune. There's a green flash on the horizon when the sun goes down—you're supposed to wish on it. You told me that." The words falter. "I can't _tell_ you who you were, Shiro. I don't know where you grew up or who taught you to drive—I don't even know why you went to the Garrison in the first place."

This is not nostalgia; these are not the details that anybody uses to build up a real person. But Shiro looks at him, glass-eyed and quiet, and Keith goes on.

"People disappear," he says. "I know—everyone does. I get that. After my dad died, I figured it didn't matter. If I could just get to space, the stars wouldn't care who liked me or didn't like me, or if I drove too fast, if I _scared people_. Being at the Garrison made things a lot easier—all I had to do was fly, and someday I'd make it up to space. And then—"

He smiles, crooked and helpless. 

"I think you can figure out what happened," Keith says.

"You used to push your hair back with both hands when you got tired. You used to talk about _everything_ , even the stuff nobody wanted to hear about: the latest suggestions from the lab for modifying boots you'd be using on spacewalks, _magnetorheological_ fluid tests. It mattered to the people around you, so it mattered to you, too. 

"I was going—kind of crazy one night, so I broke into the Garrison garages and took one of their tandem flyers out for a spin. The semester got worse, and I started going out more. Taking her out just to feel something _move_. One of the sentries caught me coming back in—said she'd check the records for my name. I broke into the records office after hours—and your name was already there. You had no idea if I was even going to be worth it back then—but you signed off on the logs for me.

"You didn't change me, Shiro," Keith says. "I did that. But no one else could've made me _want_ to change like you did."

Power coalesces, surging. He lifts his head and memory pours through them: a salute, a score flashing red, red, beaten. _I never got the trick for that corner-turn in the simulation. Mind if I watch?_ A cool towel slapped at the nape of his neck, watching his shoulders jolt in startlement. His jacket reeking of sunned concrete and the motor oil he'd spilled on it once, working on one of the monstrous Garrison vehicles. Staggering in the dark to sift through the packages that they'd piled onto Shiro's dorm desk, all his jackets and shirts and trousers pinched to military lines, his crisp and dusty textbooks boxed into cardboard, labeled for sending and donation. The photobooth reel that he'd swiped from his desk: an elbow planted on Shiro's head, Shiro wincing one eye shut, laughing. The strip where he'd pinned it to the corkboard and torn it out again. Lying under the cabin's dusty rafters at night with his arms curled in old blankets, breathing dust and the faint salt scent of stolen cotton and leather. All the ceremonials of longing, impossible to condense.

"I let a lot of people go," Keith says. "People leave—it's what they do. I know that. But not you."

Shiro stirs in his grip; his eyes flicker gold-black-gold. "Keith," he says, low and starry and wondering.

His thumb digs against the valley of Shiro's palm; his fingers lock over his wrist, knuckles grinding white. "Hold onto me," Keith says. "All right?"

The last of the stars wrench out—and the dust's roaring around them, world spinning white as they hold on. Two hearts beating to the same double-time, facing the tempest, steady at last.  


# *

  
Lesson: a girl who will not remain a princess is doomed to become a witch.

Are you listening, child? Do you understand?  


# *

  
At the end of the world, Allura rises.

The earth lolls grey and spent beneath her boots, circle after scorched, wasted circle striping over the clearing, stripped of its cicada-songs and its petaled glinting: a seed scrubbed hollow, fit to plant only ash and dust, to spread only a razing, mute contagion. The dusk twists and burns, the matchlit clouds torn alight, fire churning the guts of the sky.

Dizziness scatters a black minefield behind her eyelids. She scrunches her hands into her skirts, knots her smearing fists over her knees as she stumbles on. A heartbeat teeters on the brink of her steps, and she beckons it in, siren-sweet, a wisp of light in a swamp drawn thick as pitch, coaxing true stars out of their constellations to swallow them whole. _Wake for me—please, you must wake,_ she calls, again and again, and power shivers into her veins, power firing like sparks through wire until she rings with the surge—hers. Her veins, her marrows, power striping through from the top of her spine to her toes, and she's running across the ash-stamped earth, running on certainty, running on relief.

_Know what you are—know what you demand of the universe, and make of your demand a fire._

She knows.

Overhead: a star, a lampflame, a wish fit to crater comes hurtling to find her shadow—the Castle of Lions, answering a call felt more than heard. Her grandfather's castle, her father's. The wish flares before the thought, and with her hands knotted in fists, Allura flings back her head and _calls_ herself home: the level of unlit cells, the vast stately bedroom where she's always slept draped in canopies, the pipes bursting with green nutriments, the great halls which had once whirled with bubbling dances and laughter. Every wire and hinge of it, hers now—hers last and hers alone. The clearing trembles, whitens; but the world's singing with her light, physical laws thrumming like violin-strings, thrilling to be plucked. Down her castle comes at last, a whistling world, its stones and iron shaking like bones as it shatters the tufted clouds. It skims over the flat earth, eager as a childhood pet, turrets rattling and windows ablaze with the day, its rooting pipes and wires raking furrows through the earth's cracked skin—

Its staircase eases to a stop before her boots, and settles with a filmy puff. 

Allura breathes through the ash. She sets her foot on the stair; she climbs.

The arched doors sweep wide. The castle rings empty, bereft; everyone's poured out for this final battle, its refugees and its single regiment standing ready on the universe's behalf. Alone she wanders, nd that's familiar too. She's seen this before; she'll see it again drifting the worn pearl halls like a ghost. 

" _Wait for me,_ " she whispers, and the castle answers her: down the hall rings the scrape of tile, and a furious cry.

Once, she would have needed to rely on the mechanical lifts. Now she opens the door to the stairwell, tilts over its brink to see the steps spiraling down in a helix-turned-miracle. The railing warms to her palms as she steels herself, as she climbs onto the railing, balancing on her heels. The hush rings in her ears like her father's voice.

She steps off the edge.

Air whistles around her, a rush then a chorus, the castle singing her down to its heart. There's a sense at the back of her mind of _damage_ : lasers melted from their pistons, the prison gates blasted apart, a chain's shattered metal pooled and smeared across the hazy floor. 

She drops onto the lowest floor, a cat-light landing, before she turns for the hangar. 

The archways hang forlorn, blasted apart. Allura stretches out a hand. Into the silence, she speaks three syllables.

Tile cracks. A hiss rustles the hall, then snuffs out. 

"Witchcraft relies on seeing truly," a shadow says. It spills out of nothing, cloth and claws and lantern eyes spun back to substance. Haggar stamps down where the floortiles have opened to root her feet. Force crackles violet down through her heels; she crunches her way through the shrapnel. "That was never any name of mine."

Allura steps forward, conscious of the heavy quiet. The castle won't intervene again: this, after all, is a witch's war to wage. "Coran told us of Voltron's history some time ago." she says. "I had one of the Paladins run a search on the castle records based on his information. There was only one alchemist who worked so closely with my father, who had those markings, on the edges of her eyes. If you were once a member of the House of—"

"Names die," Haggar says, with an empire's force behind her. "The greatest comfort of nostalgia is that the dead do not come back. Weren't you _listening?_ " 

The body before her might be dead, wrapped in its prisoner's gown, kept in motion only by a soul burning possession through the old, old bones. Or perhaps it does live still, kept alive by wrists pounding with preservatives and poison, quintessence-veined eyes, alchemy stretched past imagining. _A person or a ceremonial object._

Haggar had lied after all, and badly: the position of matter can be estimated but not verified, and particles may occupy multiple places on the same spectrum. A sentient mind may exist on a thousand levels.

"Haggar, then," Allura says, quiet with exhaust. "Regardless—it's over."

Haggar stays where she's planted herself. Light moves where she does not: pooling along the floor, tendrils prying into Allura's shadow and creeping up through her spine to claw through her thoughts. "I see. You captured the quintessence of five planets, leaving only just enough for each to resurrect. In your negotiations, you bound each planet to a new treaty which acknowledged Altea as a galactic presence, though you'll owe them a great deal for the next few centuries. You used the battle with Prince Lotor as a channel to tear the usurping paladin out of the Black Lion again. A weak spell, but a clever one."

"I wasn't looking for your acknowledgment."

"Oh?" Haggar lifts her wrists as if to tug up her hood—but the hem of her once-robes has long been charred away, its ash abandoned on some driftwood wreck. "I suppose there's one last thing that I have to offer."

The hangar runs red, then white. Light filters through her skin, power tiding in waves, stars tangled in the dark netting of her veins. Sparks snap along the prisoner's robe, charring and surging. Allura lunges for her, but witch-force crackles thick between them, driving her back. "Haggar," she shouts, and the pressure strains through her lungs fit to pulp them, and at the storm's heart, the witch lifts her head, hair streaming in a comet's violent banner. 

Bright as a red star, she's on the verge of burning out.

Sound blur hollow in her ears; sound swells on her tongue. Allura curses her—a fluid, bright string of curses, blighting all her hopes, sealing her prayers under the earth where no god or emperor could find them. She curses as only someone who's lost everything could curse, conscious of the poison steeping and the need. Haggar's shields are bristling against her still, but layer by layer they give way as Allura goes on, surging up to a shout. Beneath them, the planet's churning bright with the light of five planets drained: in this instant, Allura's alive with the quintessence of ten thousand years, and Haggar is only mortal.

The witch crumples.

Light sways, ebbing away; it steadies into a dim, staining mist. In the haze, Haggar's panting shudders like an animals. She wrenches herself to her knees. Witchlight's bleached out her dead skin; it gleams sharp off her pinching lips, her pointed ears. 

"You've crippled my lord," she says, courtly and low, "and destroyed my son. What else is there for me?"

"Anything," Allura says, blank. At once she's moving forward, crossing the floor in strides. "You could become anything, Haggar. I'm sorry that Lotor's dead—I'm _sorry_. If we'd had a choice, I wouldn't have wanted you to lose him. But we could not allow Zarkon's dictatorship to stand any longer. I don't ask that you forgive me. But—please. Whatever reason you had to stand by his side, it must be gone by now. Haven't you any reason to stand on your own?"

But Haggar shudders onto her feet alone—jerks aside before their fingers brush. "And so," she says, "like any conqueror, you've destroyed what you couldn't tame, and remade the world in your own image."

"This was never a matter of _conquest_ ," Allura snaps. "Please—I've seen your power; I've felt it. But power alone isn't the end of what you are. There's so much good left to do, and so much that we could do together. If you would only—"

" _No_."

Quick despite her injuries, her draining exhaust, Haggar twists out of reach; she stands at the threshold of a bay door, shadows swaying for a ghost all hair and empty hands. Across a stretch of centuries, witch looks to witch.

"Late," Haggar whispers, "too late, I see the shape of your fear: the worst of our kind, and now the very last." She bows: the fulsome sweep of an emperor's right hand, darkness fulminating where it stretches from her robes. "Thank you for this gift of your weakness, little witch. But I do prefer you as you are: alone."

A shared thought sparks. Allura's eyes flare wide, and she lunges forward. But light's already drawn up across the hall in flare after flare, spinning columns that _snap_ like jaws around the dark figure at their heart.

The storm shatters.

Every lamp shrieks and rattles across the long walls. Ash comes flurrying down, grey and lifeless in her open hands. The hangar is empty.

Alone, Allura sinks to her knees.  


# *

  
He bolts awake.

" _Shiro._ "

Weight's sunk against his shoulders, pinned his thighs to the seat, driving the air from his lungs with every shift—and the heaviness, the thought, shatters to a laugh in his throat.

He's sitting in the Black Lion's cockpit with a living-warm body sprawled on top of him.

Intent is motion. He's tracing everything: cheek and brow and jaw as Shiro blinks, shuddering for breath. Here he is with his streaked hair and his sharp jaw, scars in rivulets and jagged valleys over his chest. Light crystallizes the arc of his throat, his chest, the pink-grey stumps carred over where metal had once swung steady as a pendulum.

A hand closes over his; Shiro's thumb slides against Keith's palm.. "I guess we took a lot out of her," Shiro says, his voice all rust, and at once Keith's conscious of the body laid bare beneath the glowing lamps. The Black Lion had brought him back, but nothing made: neither his cybernetic, nor his clothes.

His brows twitch, thinking through this triumphant indecision under the eye of an unkind universe. "What kind of _deal is that_ ," Keith bites out.

"Hey," Shiro says, the way he has a thousand times before, the way he might have said it on a launchpad, stars ago. "Easy. I'm feeling pretty grateful."

A beat, caught on one another's sharp corners. There's a thousand things he means to say, none of them kind and all of them meaningless.

But first: a smile, kindling on the very crest of Shiro's mouth.

"I'm back," he says.

Keith swallows, thick with the starscape's dust. An echo of adrenaline turns over at the back of his skull, thrumming. "How do you—feel?"

"Naked."

" _Shiro_."

Shiro laughs, soft and winterworn. "Right now—I'm just glad to be back. Let's not do that again."

His fingers twitch against the echo, the impulse: to splay along Shiro's cheeks, thumb rubbing his roughened jaw, to draw him down—to touch him just to feel his pulse resound in every corner of his frame. He's staring—he can't stop."I would," he says. "If you ever disappear—"

"Keith." Too gentle, he tugs at Keith's wrist; his eyes are dark as he sets the fist against his heart. The pulse beats beneath the knuckles like a bird against cagebars, and Keith shudders as his fingers flex loose, flattening over scars and skin—and it crashes down on him all at once: the Black Lion's radiostatic burning at the back of his skull; the way Shiro leans forward and his whole frame curves to take it, pressing his mouth to the juncture between throat and shoulder as his fist curls against the bow of Shiro's spine. There's a new brightness beneath his eyelids: memory after memory set to a different angle, all their history spun into a new light. Shiro's thinking, and if he listens he can nearly hear each thought sliding past like an abacus bead: that he must be heavy where he's still braced over the cockpit seat, must be uncomfortable for Keith to bear, the thousand details of dignity and priority; grit and green tea scalding on the tongue, nonsense memories; a parched black desert night on the library rooftop.

"You lied to me," he says, like a marvel, the gasp half-buried in skin.

Shiro exhales, a felt shudder fit to echo. Two minds caught in the shadow of the same beating memory. "I didn't mean to. That's not an excuse—I just didn't know what the truth was back then."

 _Back then._ There, propped up along a railing's rusted bars, eyes brimming with stars.

"Do you know now?" Keith says, and Shiro looks at him with careful study, like he's memorising a new page.

"My name's Takashi Shirogane," he says, clear and sure at last, "but Shiro was always easier for people to remember. My parents died—a long time ago. I was pretty young. I have one grandmother, and a couple of second cousins from her side. I went to the Garrison because I wanted to fly. I think you know the feeling."

The words are meaningless—it's momentum that matters, the kinetics of steadying himself against the seat, kneeling as he presses a thumb against Keith's cheekbone. "You don't have a favorite color," Keith says, "but you always picked the red cruisers when you signed something out for a ride. You care way too much about ice cream for an astronaut. And even if you _weren't_ lying that night, you were still wrong. I can think of one thing better than flying."

Shiro leans forward. "Tell me," he says, but Keith's already turned his head up.

His fists are shaking knots and his voice's running to rust and the world's blurring, starry and endless as his lashes stitch tight, grinding fingertips into the hard shoulderbone, hauling him down into an open kiss as the Black Lion purrs beneath their tangling limbs like a landing signal, calling them home.  


# *

  
Level by level, she walks on.

The castle sags, all its lights run to dust and its walls glinting with impact, battleworn. In silence she trails up stairs glimmering with shards, sweeping across the blasted carpets, a broken window where some stray blast had webbed and splintered the proofed glass. Her skirts are torn and scorched, her hands still grey with ash.

But she walks, and walks, until voices come ringing down the hall.

Her steps quicken, widening to strides, and then she's running. The ship bridge's doors wheel open for her, shining untouched. In the bridge, Hunk's collapsed in snores atop grim-eyed Pidge, who's wanly swaying herself as she waits over the navigational panel. She bolts upright as Allura comes into sight—at once, Hunk stutters to his feet, and promptly crashes. Lance snaps his chin up through his own holoscreen, and his whole face goes slack. 

At the farthest window, Keith's last to turn—but then, there's a figure standing beside him. A boy in battered red armor; a man in black cast-offs, sure despite the weightless flare of his scabbing, empty shoulder. A ghost made real, looking at Keith like there's nothing else in the world.

Outside every window, debris drifts by in dreaming waves. She takes her time, steps whispering one by one across the quiet. She stops just before them, her two Black Paladins, and flings her arms around them both. 

"Whoa," Shiro says, and laughs. A hand comes up at once to steady her; his broad palm burns warm along her shoulderblade. "Nice to see you too."

She'd meant to tell them after—meant to deliver all her secrets into absolution. But her tongue's studded with a witch's curses, now; it doesn't do to spend such words lightly. "I'd feared," Allura says, in the end, "that it wouldn't succeed."

"You knew what you were doing," Keith says.

 _Alfor gave up all claim to Voltron_ , the witch had said once, _from the moment that he committed it to an intergalactic crusade. The paladins aren't yours, as they never were. This war has transcended you._

And there's the key—that she isn't enough. She has never been enough. As a princess, as the Blue Lion's paladin, she was makeshift, a piece to patch the whole together. Even as a witch, she lied to her allies over and over, used her friends like pawns. She brought back the soldier they'd lost but she couldn't make him whole again.

"I knew," Allura says, "that you trusted me."

"You have to know," Shiro says, and startlement draws her back to his wry gaze. "I owe you a lot more than I can say.After everything I did—you didn't have to bring me back."

"As you never had to follow me."

"You asked for our help saving the universe," Keith says, and for once he looks at her as if she's something a little more than a ghost, an obstacle, a guide. "It wasn't exactly a hard choice."

"I realise that." Allura sets her shoulders to a sharper line. "It doesn't mean that I owe you any less. Even as Altea's princess, I had no right to do it—but you came with me. Soon, I'll have even less. Altea—" 

Shining mountains and the meadows crowned with juniberry flowers. The way the lake had looked in spring as they descended upon it—how she'd once convinced her father to drive the castle across the lagoon, driving up shattering blue waves which rattled the local village but made her shriek with delight. Her father's head flung back in full-throated laughter through the glassy summer light.

This doubt will follow her always: that she could have done better, been stronger. But she is what she is, and her friends are with her. It's a start.

"Altea," Allura says, "will never return. This castle is the last remaining piece of Altea's history. I don't need the title of _princess_ to retain it." She turns. "Never mind that. Lotor may have lost one path to his father's throne, but there's a great deal left to do, Shiro. A great many worlds to recover, to save. Will you take up your role again as a paladin of Voltron?"

Shiro's smiling, wry and human, standing at the beginning of the end to their long war. His fingers curl in Keith's, and he doesn't look away. "I think you know the answer to that one," he says.  


# *

  
—only nothing ever ends where it's supposed to.

They talk in a square white bunk at the top of the castle, going forth and back until talk cascades into dreaming. In a shared drift of night, their breaths unspool to the same quiet pull. This is no surprise. Keith's trailed his memories, called him back from infinite space; that kind of surrender leaves its mark even after their dreamscape's unraveled to dust. Intimacy, once invited, learns a thousand ways to trespass. Keith thinks of a flight maneuver and Shiro measures out the map for it; he leans back to a body that's already braced for his weight. 

What's forming between them isn't a matter of mindreading, but it's something close: they will always move, now, to the same electric impulse. Later, together, they will dream their way back: Keith curling under blankets as Shiro's breath feathers against his nape and—

 _Through_ the dust they tumble, the stars reeling and wheeling down the timeline. Time is a construct, a conspiracy between matter and perception, and memory comes spinning out of him like a confession to the crime. Light mass in clouds over a stripped, hazy desert—and he's back on the library roof with Shiro leaning over him. Sand dunes sway in the distance, glittering full of stars, the world sprawled unchanged beneath them.

"-manuals, Shiro," Keith finds himself saying, cross and quiet, a faithful ghost of the boy he'd been at seventeen. "They're not going to teach you anything you don't already know."

"I think you're giving me more credit than I deserve," Shiro says. There's a hundred fighter pilots gunning for his place, and at least a few have scores as good as his. He's had a series of lucky coincidences, but _luck_ holds a pale, narrow orbit around Earth; past the troposphere, there's only the encrusted stars.

"Just admit it." Keith's all jutting jaw and squirming. Shiro presses a palm over his bicep, squeezing a reminder: _easy there_. "You know what I mean. Some people were born to fly."

"Takes one to know one," he says, and his grin unfurls at Keith's stark-eyed look. "Have to admit, though—there's a lot I'm going to miss on this trip."

Keith spares a look around, incredulous. "Like _what_ ," he says, with teenage dread for sentiment.

"Well," Shiro says, "I'll be off-planet for at least one year." He's grinning. "They just announced a new flavor of ice cream. And that's two seasons of blockbusters that I won't be able to catch up on. Supposedly one of the best motorcycle manufacturers in the world just won a bid to do our next round of equipment, too—they're trying to get the prototypes out to us nine months from now. I'm going to be an out-of-date old man by the time I get back, compared to you."

Keith shifts his elbows, scrabbles one across the dirt as he leans up, stopping just short. He's glowering close, brows drawn. The line of his jaw burns like daylight, veins fine as ink beneath and the pulse a flicker, bright with the day's salt. A thumb's swipe would scrub away the gleam, smooth the pounding pulse. "I don't think you need to be jealous," he says, and Shiro casts back to the dusk. "They're just movies and ice cream. The bikes'll be even better when you get back." He looks away to some scrawl of breaking light on the horizon. "I'll wait for you to get used to them."

"A handicap, huh?"

"It's not a win if it's easy."

Keith's warm beneath him, a boy with constellated eyes and a mouth bitten thin, and he has to keep thinking in images, because if he stops and pieces the abstract edges of all those pieces together, the pounding heat and cool sweat of the body beneath, he just might—

His lungs burn shallow. Shiro says, "You always get me thinking."

"Yeah?"

"I want to tell you a secret," he says, though he doesn't mean to. He offers a hand, and Keith takes the pull to his feet. Together they wander over to prop themselves onto the library railing like fledglings. "Don't laugh—it's a tradition, all right? My family used to tell me: before you head out on a long trip, give someone three secrets to keep for you. That way you'll have something to come back for."

Keith laughs. "What secrets do you even _have_?"

"Yeah, that's the tough part. You'll have to humor me. Let's see," but he's crooking a smile at once. "I still haven't seen a Star Wars movie."

"Space is going to be wasted on you."

"The second one," Shiro says, spinning out the thought. "I never liked biology that much. Physics spoiled me. Nature versus nurture, gene expression—none of it clicked like physics did. I don't think it matters where you were born or how you were raised. You're right—some people are just _meant_ for the sky. You look at them," he glances sidelong, mouth crooking, "and you just know. I'm cheating a little," he admits, wry. "It's not really a secret, but you should hear Sam Holt go on about perfecting his symposium presentation for gene expression in protozoans exposed to freezing temperatures and zero gravity."

"I think I'll pass." Keith says, lead-voiced. He cocks a brow. "You're still missing one."

The third beads and knots in the cords of his throat—but he means it. He has to. "I think I'm pretty lucky to have met you," he says, quick and low. "I've always wanted a little brother."

Silence. Keith stares at him, and Shiro looks back—really looks, for once, in a way that he's trained himself out of doing. Keith's leaned back against the railing, elbows all sharp against the silver. He's rumpled and just barely colt-legged now: at the tail-end of his gangling phase, finishing out the promise of sinew and blistering speed. His hair curls on the defiant crest of regulation at his nape. He's wearing the same gloves that he wore three years ago, fingerless and backless, and the only thing which saves them cliche's how they reframe his fingers into quick movements. 

He's already dangerous, this boy who wears his jagged edges and a reek of gasoline. In a handful of months, he'll be devastating. 

"What do you think?" Shiro says.

Keith narrows his eyes, turning over. "I'm not that little," he says, and Shiro laughs.

In silence, they watch the desert night strip layers off the dunes. 

"I want to ask you something."

"By all means."

His shoulders draw up; a blunted boot kicks a bar three times, turning the words over. "You've been to orbit already," Keith says. "Is it really like the simulators?"

The half-dreamt shape of an answer tenses and jumps in his throat. It isn't exactly the question Keith means to ask; Keith has a gift for understatements and a swordsman's fatal habit—too sharp, too precise, edging himself out of answers that he could use. But there's no harm in a distraction here. 

"Technically," Shiro says, wry, "you aren't supposed to find out what they're like until next year. But I guess that makes for a decent secret. All right. 

"You know that feeling you get whenever you walk really close to the edge of something higher up? A branch, a roof—a railing. It's not exactly like thinking you _want_ to fall—there's just this weight in your bones like you know how it'd feel. Some part of you doesn't really believe that you could fall. It dreams that you'll step off the edge, and fly."

Keith doesn't prompt him; he doesn't answer at all, and doesn't need to. It's an understood thing between them: the way Keith's eyes cling to the railings whenever they're on a rooftop together, the times that Shiro's risen to catch him walking spindling rooftops and domes, a brazen figure with lined steps and wing-steady, measuring hands. They're neither of them built for flight: evolution's stripped any promise of wings from their shoulderblades, layered dense sinew where there should be hollow pockets for weightless speed. A longing incongruous to everything they are.

"Obviously, you know that thrill isn't real," Shiro says. "But you want it anyway—so much that you know exactly how flying would feel. If you could just take that first step..."

He stops. Keith's still looking at him, all whipcord grace and eyes cut dark, with the same fixed intent he's never quite known how to take, sure as a compass needle swinging true north. 

"I promise," Shiro says, "flying's better. You just have to get up there, and you'll see for yourself. Trust me, all right?"

Keith only nods. Abruptly he leans over, clasps Shiro's knuckles where they've perched against the railing. "Ursa Major," he says, to which Shiro only stares.

"What?"

"You've got a lot of final reviews coming up. It's probably better if you start with the basics."

There's a thousand things that astronauts are expected to know: refueling best practices; how to make and record adjustments to everything from cameras to deployers; how to work with engineers on the ground to map out equipment failures. They won't be far out enough to see the constellations reshaped for months. "That's not how space works, Keith," Shiro tells him, helpless and smiling. "That's not how anything works."

"That sounds like stalling," Keith says.

Shiro laughs.

Someday he'll do better than this. _Someday_ , like a threshold drawn and crossed—but for this night, this quiet trust's enough: rough-lined knuckles under his thumb as he cranes skyward, pointing together to the ceaseless stars, the warmth between them greater than any flight could ever swallow.

# *

  



End file.
